Portrait (Hals)
Jason Salavon American
Not on view
Using software he designs himself, Salavon produces typological averages of related images such as Playboy centerfolds, high-school yearbook portraits, and Old Master paintings. To create this photograph, which was inspired by the Metropolitan Museum’s Dutch Golden Age painting galleries, the artist gathered high-quality reproductions of portraits by Frans Hals. He then used an open-source programming language to generate the paintings’ mathematical average. The result is an impressionistic composite that reveals the hidden norm lurking within the Dutch master’s oeuvre.