Irmão Macário is the creative alter ego of Mário Pires, a visual artist working from Lisbon since 1984.

Where Mário captures light through the lens — in series like Bleak City (exhibited at ephemere, Tokyo) and Flora Arcana— Irmão Macário builds worlds. Characters, architectures, mythologies. Figures that carry their own gravity.

The work draws from the tradition of Franco-Belgian bande dessinée — Moebius, Druillet, Bilal — where the line between illustration and vision dissolves. But it is made now, with the tools of now: AI-enhanced image generation (Midjourney, Kling), guided by four decades of understanding composition, light, narrative, and the alchemy of the image.

This is not prompt engineering. This is an artist’s practice — one that began in darkrooms and exhibition halls, passed through video, calligraphy, and collaborative installation, and has arrived at a place where generative tools serve a vision shaped by years of looking, making, and thinking about what images do.

What Irmão Macário creates:

Character design and visual development for games, film, animation, and publishing. Fully realized figures with backstory, presence, and visual coherence — from concept sketches to production-ready assets. World-building that gives characters a place to exist.

The method:

AI opens the door to rapid exploration — hundreds of variations, unexpected mutations, visual accidents that a human hand alone would never find. But every image passes through the filter of craft: compositional judgment, chromatic sensitivity, narrative logic. Technology proposes. The artist decides.

For:

Game studios, animation teams, indie creators, graphic novel publishers, and anyone building a story that needs characters worth remembering.

→ See the work → Get in touch → Mário Pires’ photography and fine art practice: mariopires.net