In the recent corpus of Roh Orielly Filsinger’s digital art, one encounters a peculiar paradox: a reckoning with myth through the language of chaos, a masculinity deconstructed not with violence, but with a needle pulling through pixels. Filsinger’s work occupies that increasingly porous space between the archetypal and the algorithmic, where dreamlike symbolism contends with the pixelated haze of contemporary life. The result is an oeuvre as fragmented as it is coherent—images that at first disorient, then linger, like echoes of a story half-remembered.
Filsinger is not merely interested in surrealism as aesthetic play; rather, he takes the movement’s Freudian legacy—its obsession with the subconscious, with ritual, with the grotesque—and repurposes it in a digital key. His figures are less Dalinian than post-human: faceless warriors rendered in vaporwave hues, distorted forms that hover between the heroic and the absurd. Their armor is often made of mirrored chrome or biometric data; their swords resemble corrupted .JPEG files, more ornamental than operable. Through such visual strategies, Filsinger creates not icons but phantoms, appropriating the grandeur of myth while refusing to grant it stability.
In the piece The Sorrow of Atlas, Refracted, we see a towering, silver-bodied figure bending not under the weight of the world but under the fractured light of multiple browser tabs. The myth of masculine burden—the Atlas archetype—is here reconceived through a digital framework. The burden is not the globe but information: surveillance, performativity, self-curation. The masculine is undone not by war but by the mirror. This reimagining of strength as spectacle—specifically, one mediated by the screen—positions Filsinger within the broader contemporary critique of masculinity as both performance and prison. There is tragedy in his heroes, but also a winking theatricality.
Filsinger’s palette often evokes the post-internet aesthetic—acidic neons, clashing pastels, and the uncanny glow of artificial lighting. Yet unlike the more nihilistic strains of digital surrealism, his work remains deeply emotive. Faces blur, bodies melt into architecture, but the emotional register is consistently calibrated to longing, dislocation, even tenderness. In Cain.exe, a brutalist reimagining of fratricide unfolds across a sterile VR landscape. Yet Cain’s face, partially rendered in a looping animation, betrays regret with a twitch of code—a tear flickering down his cheek like a glitch. The biblical has become data, the sacred subsumed into the stream.
Perhaps what makes Filsinger’s work so compelling is his understanding that myth is not static—it mutates in the medium. In the digital era, where stories are constantly revised, reposted, and recontextualized, the mythic becomes viral. This notion pervades Eros is a Firewall, in which the classical god of love is recast as a network administrator—his arrows now pop-up ads, his gaze filtered through lens flare and CAPTCHA verification. Love is not divine but deterrent; it interrupts rather than enchants. The piece operates with sardonic wit, yet the underlying argument is sharp: digital intimacy is real, but refracted—eroticism becomes performance, vulnerability becomes interface.
One might be tempted to describe Filsinger as anti-narrative, but that would mischaracterize the kind of storytelling he undertakes. His is a myth-making of fragments, closer to Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical images” than to coherent allegory. The viewer is asked not to decode but to drift—to let the visual symbols act as affective triggers, portals into private interpretations. The minotaur reappears in multiple works, but never in a labyrinth—rather, in a cubicle, a parking garage, an iOS loading screen. He is not slain but archived, a monster made mundane.
A central tension in Filsinger’s work is between apocalypse and apathy. Masculinity, in his visual language, is always on the brink—of collapse, of reinvention, of meme-ification. Chaos is not merely aestheticized but existential: it seeps into the very infrastructure of identity. His men are both avatars and allegories, suggesting that in a media ecology saturated with performance, the masculine self is now a brand, curated with the same detachment one might apply to a Spotify playlist or an Instagram filter.
But within this critique lies a kind of melancholy nostalgia—for heroism, for myth, for the sublime. In The Last Ganymede, a young, ambiguous figure floats through a desolate orbital station, surrounded by derelict satellites and broken promises. The classical narrative of divine abduction and beauty becomes a meditation on abandonment and obsolescence. Even the gods, it seems, have moved on. The boy is left with echoing signal transmissions and the cold glow of irrelevant data. And yet, the beauty remains—tragic, yes, but unmistakably sincere.
To engage with Roh Orielly Filsinger’s art is to be caught in a recursive loop between the ancient and the emergent. He draws from the deep well of collective mythology but renders it through the glitching lens of contemporary media. Surrealism, masculinity, and chaos do not merely coexist in his work—they collide, recombine, and reassert themselves as cultural code. What results is not resolution, but resonance—a sense that, in our post-everything age, even the gods must learn to refresh.