Virgin is here! is a work created by Philippe Orsero in 2006. 

This piece, realized in mixed media (transfer on canvas, acrylic or oil), measures 55 x 46.5 cm for one version, and 130 x 97 cm for another.From its very inception, “Virgin is here!” anticipated—well before it became a media topic—the debates surrounding artificial intelligence and the post-human condition. The piece subverts the classical figure of the Virgin and Child through a post-digital reinterpretation. The hybrid female figure, painted in vivid colors, appears to emerge from morphing software: a sacred icon transformed into a digital artifact.She holds a realistic baby, at once human and artificial, like a child born from a technological matrix. This duo fuses the sacred, advertising, and digital language, posing a burning question: Where does creation begin and end in the age of machines?Critical AnalysisThe work creates tension between iconographic tradition and emerging technologies, revealing the fragility of our visual references in the face of the virtual. The visual treatment—splashes of color, layering, play of transparencies—engages in dialogue with the coldness of the pixel and the nostalgia of classical painting.Virgin is here! is not just an homage or a provocation: it is a signal. It anticipates how AI will disrupt our relationship to the body, to filiation, reproduction, and collective memory.The message fuses the sacred and consumerism, the organic and the synthetic, questioning the origin and destiny of humanity in a world saturated with images and codes. 

😉♞♗                There are paintings that are born as much from a place as from an era.

In 2006, I lived at the top of a southern village, my studio opening onto a small square where, at the center, stood the Virgin on her column. She watched over everything: peaceful and mysterious, witness to a thousand years of history, invasions, rebirths, and silences. The bells of the church marked daily life, like so many heartbeats of the village, once coveted by lords and armies, today still bearing the name of the Count of Poujol.

Every morning, I found this Virgin imposing and humble, majestic and servant, fragile and powerful at once. She was the living memory of a civilization, the invisible guardian of a crossroads of human stories. I loved listening to the bells, feeling the southern light dance on the stone, and contemplating this figure who seemed to cross the centuries to watch me work.

One evening in 2006, the studio was bathed in a strange, almost electric light. I was working on a canvas, the silence broken only by the gentle crackle of my computer, already an inseparable companion. For weeks, I had been collecting image fragments: sacred icons, modern advertisements, anonymous faces from the digital stream, flashes of artificial color. I was searching for the fault line, the place where the sacred slips into the contemporary, where collective memory meets the chaos of code.

It was there, in that suspended time, that she appeared. A mutant Virgin, neither entirely human nor fully machine, the result of intuitive morphing more than controlled programming. Her skin seemed made of pixelated light, her gaze carried the nostalgia of another world, and in her arms, a troubling child, both organic and synthetic.

This improbable duo was not a provocation, but a question—or rather, a vertigo: what remains of mystery when technology takes hold of myths? Where does creation begin, and reproduction end? Who, the artist or the machine, still carries the breath?

As I painted, I felt I was in dialogue with the future: a silent voice whispered that soon, such figures would emerge from algorithms, that the sacred would find its place in the cold memory of data.

Virgin is here! was born from that tension, from that premonition, from that night when I understood that the artistic gesture, even when augmented, never gives up the poetry of doubt.

Today, looking at this painting, I remember the scent of acrylic, the crackle of the screen, the moment when the Virgin, set in the heart of the 21st century, already carried in her arms the child of a world yet to come.

And I still wonder: where will we be in five hundred, in a thousand years? What form will memory take? What will remain of our images, our fears, our dreams?

To paint is to connect the instant with the vertigo of time, to travel through history leaving behind, on the canvas, the fragile trace of a dialogue between the invisible, the past, and the future.  

Philippe ORSERO