Frank Jons: chromatic explosions!
He could have ended up as a partner in an auditing firm, but a job interview convinced him to follow his true calling: painting. Interview.
Alexandre Farto: LAYERS, the Meeting of Physical and Digital Art
Renowned contemporary artist Alexandre Farto, better known as Vhils, has surprised contemporary art aficionados once again by unveiling his new, experimental project, LAYERS.
What is the foundation of LAYERS?
Developed by the DRP.io platform, LAYERS is an attempt to create a bridge between the art market and Web 3.0. In short, Web 3.0, would thus succeed the current Web 2.0 era. Web 3.0 is marked by the emergence of GAFAM and the awareness that the Internet giants possess monumental amounts of personal data, often without the users' knowledge – which would offer users the possibility of controlling their data, their identity, and their destiny. As you might expect, blockchain is the foundation of the Web 3.0 edifice. But what does this have to do with Vhils? The blockchain provides a sense of security and uniqueness. And as the saying goes, "What's rare is expensive," especially when it comes to works of art. For some time now, they could be authenticated and secured like a Bitcoin. This digitization of art is based on NFTs, non-fungible cryptographic tokens that have their own identity, like a master painting, and are traded according to supply and demand.
“With my work, I try to delve into the several layers that compose the edifice of history, to take the shadows cast by this model of uniform development to try and understand what lies behind it.”
How is LAYERS personalizing art?
LAYERS is NFT's first scalable project in which collectors can co-create artworks on the Ethereum blockchain. The artworks will change over time and according to individual wishes, with everyone free to “tear” each “layer” they own as they see fit, although there is a threshold that must not be crossed - allowing three attempts. The ultimate goal is to develop a new ecosystem based on these non-fungible tokens and focused on a single artist. This is not the first time Vhils has ventured into the intriguing world of crypto artists. His famous "Scratching the Surface" project resulted in 10,000 interactive artworks, hosted entirely on the blockchain. The LAYERS project offers 3,000 blank cavasses for sale.
What is Vhils’ favored medium?
For almost twenty years, Vhils has been revisiting traditional artistic techniques by proposing revolutionary creations that aim to dissect the various layers of ambient culture and modernity that are normally invisible to the naked eye. His usual favorite terrain? The big cities and their neglected and abandoned areas. As a leading representative of urban art, Vhils has developed a diverse and innovative personal aesthetic. He favors the wall as his main support, which he does not hesitate to scratch, gnaw or even explode... to better reveal the essence of urban environments. His motto could be "destroy to build." The digital turn claimed by the artist since "Scratching the Surface" and embodied in the multiple layers of LAYERS is only a reformulation of his philosophy: The possibility of attacking the work of art is, in essence, an act of creation.
Sources:
1) https://mymodernmet.com/fr/vhils-street-art-nft/