Artist Salomé Gomis Trezise: ​“AI sets the playing field to zero”

It’s not easy to bring a project to life these days, especially when you’re a *deep breath* director, photographer, artist, casting and artistic director, like Salomé. A lack of connections and funds can be restrictive, but she has found a way of realising her vision via… AI. Now, we know what you’re thinking, but hear us out.

Salomé, 25, is crafting glamorous and hyperreal scenes that burst with narrative, challenging the idea that the tool stumps creativity. She’s worked with Nike on an Air Max campaign and Pa Salieu on the cover for his mixtape Afrikan Alien; now, she’s produced a stylish music video for Rema’s new track Baby (Is it a Crime) which explores a night of romance, reminiscent of an early Noughties music video.

Born in Paris and raised between Brussels and London, Salomé has spent the last few years making AI work for her, viewing the tool as a way to remove limits from realising her creative vision. ​“Most of the time when I write treatments or decks, I make the imagery with AI because I’m able to visually translate the idea I’m trying to convey in a way thats so close to how I’d actually want it to be,” she says. ​“I love using real references, too, but a lot of the time I cant find a precise [one] for what I want because it doesn’t exist.

Though she acknowledges people’s concerns, she sees the tool as a great leveller: ​“it’s all about intention. Unfortunately, AI is in the hands of people who have ill intentions, and people’s jobs and livelihoods will be affected by it,” she says. ​“But I don’t think that that necessarily means that people who want to use it to explore and create should be shunned away from that experience. It’s a really interesting tool, because it sets the playing field to zero.”

One of her most captivating scenes is that of a yacht in Miami full of gorgeous, perturbed looking women holding cocktail glasses. The driver of the boat looks on, hand gripping the neck of the woman in the passenger seat. Beyond them, the skyline is reflected in the water as tension, heat and excess radiates from the screen. It was the artist’s way of depicting the city’s troubling underbelly.

​“Miami is known notoriously for its vice,” Salomé says. She created the image, along with others in a series, after being invited to Miami Art Basel last year where she got to experience the city’s hedonism for herself. Though she admits she enjoyed her time there, there’s an underlying tension to the city that proved ripe for storytelling. ​“On one hand, you have this facade of glitz and glamour that celebrities and wealth bring, but on the other, I feel like you can sense that huge gap between marginalised and privileged people,” she explains. ​“There’s a dark atmosphere there.”

More recently, the artist has been expanding on her AI cartoon series where she re-imagines scenes from a more diverse perspective, inspired by the ones she grew up watching. The results are sweetly comical — a family fighting over a Christmas tree ornament, a regretful clink of champagne flutes and a dinner set ablaze all tell a story of a holiday gone awry. ​“I wanted to take more of a satirical route,” she says. ​“For a lot of people, due to their family dynamic, Christmas is actually the worst time of year so I wanted to bring a funnier tone to the dysfunctionality of it.”

Hey Salomé! From photography to AI cartoons, your work is so varied. What commonalities are there between both?

It’s always a kind of introspective reflection of myself and the world around me. A lot of the time, the themes in my work are Black love and family – I’m trying to shine an authentic light on the stories that are being told when it comes to Black people.

In the past couple of years, unfortunately, Blackness has become a trend. Every major brand and creative director is trying to push for that ​‘darker the berry, sweeter the juice’ aesthetic. But a lot of the time, behind the scenes, you’ll find that it’s a white photographer or a whole white production team.

It’s great that we’re able to showcase imagery of ourselves and people who look like us more freely but let’s make sure that it’s intentional and not just what’s working right now on socials and in marketing.

You’ve been working on cartoons that portray Black families and characters since 2023. Could you tell us more about that?

I [initially] made them for my inner child and then everyone else. Growing up, I just never saw cartoons that looked like me or anyone I knew and if I did, it was in a very stereotypical way.

[At uni] through my thesis research, I discovered how important imagery is to your self-perception and understanding where you place yourself in society, creating as much positive imagery as possible is a really beautiful thing to be able to do.

The cartoons obviously show a Christmas that didn’t go to plan. How do you decide whether you’re going to create something real or a fantasy when making art?

I like to make things that feel futuristic as an ideal projection of what I’d want. That’s what I really love about AI. Sometimes I feel like I can tap into things that didn’t happen like [re-imagining more diverse] imagery from the forties, fifties and sixties as well as making cartoons from an era that I could have, but never did see as a kid.

What influences your process the most?

Music plays an enormous part in all of my work. I would say 98 per cent of my work is made in response to how a song made me feel.

Your scenes are so filmic. Do movies inspire you at all?

Tremendously. I had an iPod Touch when I was 11 and I’d be illegally watching things I definitely shouldn’t have been, like Enter The Void by Gaspar Noé! Visually, that really opened my perspective and [helped me understand] that there really aren’t as many rules as you think. You can really just express yourself in any way.

You mentioned that AI levels the playing field but you’ve obviously learned a lot about how to manipulate it and produce prompts that fulfil your vision. What advice would you give to those hoping to use AI for good?

Write a narrative, my prompts are like short stories. I’m literally just playing around with [AI]. So I always just tell people to experiment . The way I learned was spending a weekend on my computer just typing until I got it to how I wanted it to be.