Simon Alverman, known as playbreak, is a digital artist working within contemporary portraiture, where the human face is obscured, reconstructed, or replaced by materials, structures, and systems.
MY PROCESS
His figures are not portraits of individuals, but symbolic forms, stand-ins through which ideas of control, protection, progress, and the tension between organic life and engineered design are explored.
Drawing influence from fashion photography, science-fiction cinema, and digital subcultures, playbreak’s work occupies a space between refinement and disquiet.
Visual excess functions as a deliberate strategy rather than ornamentation: saturated colour fields and precise surface detail sit in contrast to erased or concealed expressions, evoking simultaneous authority and absence.
Central to the practice is the point at which the human figure becomes abstract, where identity dissolves into signal, armour, ornament, or system. Meaning is not fixed but held in suspension; the work resists narrative resolution, operating instead through atmosphere, presence, and tension.
Rather than speculating on the future, playbreak reflects the present, filtered, intensified, and observed at a measured distance. Within this space, beauty and unease coexist, and the human form is rendered not as an answer, but as an open and persistent question.
