Trauma Clickbait
Julian Brangold is an artist based in Buenos Aires.
Valerie’s Factory
November 1, 2025 – January 2026
This exhibition marks the first major presentation of Julián Brangold’s recent work in an institutional scale environment. Anchored by thirteen large scale oil paintings, a sculpture assembled from repurposed mech model kits, and a 15 minute 11 second single channel video loop, Trauma Clickbait examines the symbolic and behavioral logics that shape contemporary internet culture.
The exhibition takes its title from its central inquiry into the entanglement between desire and the online sphere. Brangold’s recent paintings are organized into two bodies of work: The 8 Seals of the Apocalypse and Thanatos and Ferals. The first series originates from digital processes in which multiple AI models, custom trained on a large archive of contemporary online aesthetics including niche memetics, shitposting, conspiratorial diagrammatics, and nonsensical brainrot, are recombined into synthetic collages. Thanatos and Ferals draws on a widely circulated AI model employed within online communities to produce furry themed pornography; Brangold extracts its two dimensional characters and overlays them onto generative collages constructed from open source databases of natural disaster imagery.
Both series were conceived digitally and subsequently translated into painting through commissions executed by professional copyists in China. Through this layered production process, Trauma Clickbait foregrounds the circulatory systems through which images move, mutate, and acquire new symbolic charge as they transition from the digital to the material realm.
Presented alongside these paintings is a sculpture constructed from model kit mech components sourced from hobbyist cultures. The reassembled structure positions the robotic figures in sexual configurations, referencing the niche online communities including dedicated subreddits where users stage and circulate mech figures in explicit scenarios. The work underscores the varied expressions of desire that emerge across digital networks, where fetishistic and paraphilic visual languages can proliferate and thrive.
The exhibition’s time based component is a continuously looping 15-minute-11-second video. Drawing from a large archive of online materials produced by the Chinese religious cult known as “The Eastern Lightning”, whose relocation to global digital platforms, particularly Facebook, followed its prohibition within China. The work examines the group’s distinctive use of AI generated devotional imagery. Central to their doctrine is the notion of environmental catastrophe as divine punishment for rejecting the incarnation of Jesus as a contemporary Chinese woman. Brangold reinterprets these circulating visual materials to construct a video that echoes the structure of an induction film, reframed through the artist’s own lens.
Throughout the exhibition, Brangold addresses the ways digital culture scripts attention, desire, and the sense of the real. By translating screen based textures, memetic logics, and internet born aesthetics into painting, sculpture, and video, Trauma Clickbait maps the complex coordinates of contemporary image consumption, where trauma circulates as both lure and currency.
