GIOIELLO
Designer
Thomas-Armin Mathes
Country
Germany
category
Conceptual & Fine Art
Prize
Official Selection 2026
Short Description
GIOIELLO examines the social and psychological power of precious jewellery. Why do certain objects become desirable far beyond their material value? What are we willing to do to possess them, preserve them or be recognised through them?
The series explores jewellery as a system of status, inheritance, belonging and exclusion. What changes when wealth is earned, desired or simply received? Does possession make us more significant — or merely richer?
Through the visual language of high jewellery advertising, GIOIELLO turns luxury into a mirror, revealing how deeply value depends on the meanings a society chooses to attach to it.
Prompt Logic
The prompt logic was built around the visual codes of high jewellery advertising: controlled lighting, polished surfaces, restrained composition, luxurious materials, elegant typography and highly specific product presentation.
Each work began with a conceptual function rather than a decorative object. I developed fictional jewels around ideas such as perception, restraint, protection, inheritance and silence, then translated those ideas into product forms that could plausibly belong to an ultra-luxury maison.
The body and the object were conceived as two interconnected images: one showing the jewellery in use, the other presenting it as a desirable product. This pairing was essential. I wanted the seductive language of luxury advertising to remain intact while allowing the object’s symbolic function to become increasingly unsettling.
Throughout the process, I refined material realism, proportion, surface detail and visual coherence so that the fictional brand could feel credible. The prompts therefore balanced two opposing goals: maximum elegance on the surface, and conceptual tension beneath it.
GIOIELLO is built on that contradiction: the more desirable the object appears, the more uncomfortable its meaning becomes.
Process
GIOIELLO began with a fascination for the visual language of high jewellery: precision, rarity, restraint, prestige and the promise of permanence. I was interested in what makes these objects desirable beyond their physical beauty — and in the social systems that give them power.
Precious jewellery can signal status, inheritance, intimacy, protection, control or belonging. It can distinguish one person from another, open doors, create distance and carry expectations across generations. At the same time, its meaning is never inherent in the object itself; it is produced by culture, class, history and desire.
The project developed around a series of questions: What are we willing to sacrifice for symbols of value? What happens when luxury is inherited rather than achieved? Does possession transform identity, or simply expose existing hierarchies? How much of our self-image depends on what our society considers precious?
Each work pairs a body with a fictional jewel designed to embody one of these tensions. The campaign language remains elegant and seductive, while the function of the objects gradually becomes more ambiguous — perceptive, protective, restrictive, binding or silencing.
Developing the series in Midjourney was itself part of the challenge. Many of the concepts involve restraint, control, bodily proximity and ambiguous forms of protection or restriction — themes that sit close to ethical and safety boundaries in generative image systems.
I therefore had to work carefully with suggestion rather than explicitness, refining language, composition and symbolism so that the images could retain their conceptual tension without becoming graphic or sensational. This limitation ultimately strengthened the project: it forced the work to remain elegant, coded and psychologically suggestive rather than literal.
The challenge throughout was to preserve the credibility of a luxury campaign while allowing discomfort to emerge beneath the surface. GIOIELLO uses beauty not as an answer, but as a medium through which questions of power, privilege and social value become visible.
