Eminem in Oil

Steve Payne takes photographs—profile pictures, celebrity shots—and converts them into classical painted portraits. The kind where the subject would normally be a Flemish merchant or a 19th-century general with a complicated coat. Except now it’s Eminem looking appropriately martial, or Rihanna with the full oil-paint gravity of someone whose estate will outlast most governments, or Steve Jobs rendered with the weight of Dutch Golden Age portraiture.

The joke is obvious but the dissonance is genuine. There’s something about seeing Jobs’ face in that style that stops being funny after a moment—like it’s less a parody than a prediction, the portrait historians would actually commission if commissioned portraits still meant anything. These are, after all, the people whose likenesses will end up in the cultural equivalent of attics, and someone centuries from now will ask who they were.

Or it’s just that Eminem looks completely at home as a Napoleonic officer. Both things can be true.