pro
Mauricio Pontual
AI Art Director — brands, campaigns & visuals.
New to Contra
Mauricio is ready for their next project!
Definitely wasn’t expecting this! Really happy to see my project featured by the Contra team. Such a nice surprise to open the platform and find this today 🙌
Thank you, Contra! 🖤
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I went into The Met's open access archive looking for a textile. I found the pattern I wanted on a suit of armour instead.
Greenwich, 1586. George Clifford was Queen's Champion to Elizabeth I, and his garniture is etched and gilded with her cipher, two E's back to back, repeated across every plate from helmet to sabaton without a break. Not a badge on the chest. A repeat running over an entire body, worn by royal licence, three hundred years before any house put its initials on a bag.
So I took it off the steel and put it back on a body.
RUNNING CIPHER is one woven matrix and eight streetwear pieces cut from it, shot on Yorkshire moorland in winter with the sun never higher than eighteen degrees above the horizon. My first matrix was wrong: I kept the cipher at armour scale and it collapsed into generic damask. Enlarging it four times was what made it read as a garment print instead of wallpaper. That failed version is still sitting on the canvas next to the one that worked.
The casting carries the argument. Clifford's only child, Anne, was written out of the inheritance when her father left the northern estates to his brother. She spent thirty-eight years in court, won in 1643, and rebuilt the castles herself. The mark he borrowed from a queen is now worn by the women who took the land back.
Everything is on the canvas: the Met plates that fed the matrix, every rejected generation, the casting tests, the frames that did not make it.
Original work: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/23939
Armor Garniture of George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland. Jacob Halder, royal
workshops at Greenwich, 1586. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.130.6a–y. Open Access.
Canvas: https://app.flora.ai/view/js78s0ypjspgsg3t3pjf5xd6d98dkwrb
@floraai #FLORAMuseum
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AI Becomes Editorial - Tropical Test
Part of an ongoing personal series exploring the limits of AI in fashion editorial. This episode tests character and wardrobe consistency across a tropical setting across multiple frames. Shot with real product references to push continuity under realistic conditions. AI isn't the concept. It's the medium.
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Adidas "Grown Underground" — Spec Product Design & Campaign
Personal study exploring AI as a product design tool. A Superstar made from zero — texture, color and material conceived entirely through AI, then directed into a full campaign. No physical shoe existed. Shot like it already did.
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