PAK  X  TREVORJONES
Nifty Gateway 

Thursday, 17 Dec 2020

the six portraits

"Oh man, they're so sexy, so legit, I really love the angles Pak's put the camera on and the colour palette is so not digital, it's this weird, almost religious iconography palette but deconstructed." ~ SuperMassive, The Defiant
  1. The Collaboration​
  2. The Project
  3. The Collection

1. THE collaboration

You have no idea how excited I've been about this collaboration with the sublime pak! Pak is one of the biggest names in the space and the work we've created for this drop is breathtaking.

What makes this work so remarkable is that the two of us couldn’t be more different; pak is a renowned designer, the founder of Undream and one of the prominent social media figures as the creator of Archillect (2.2 million followers), a minimalist with an unknown identity... and I’m an artist, a messy and expressive painter who wears his heart on his sleeve and my life is pretty much an open book on Twitter.  🎨

the project

> A collaboration between the most* digital and the most* physical creators of the NFT space
> A collaboration between the minimalist and the maximalist
> A collaboration between the traditional and the new.
 
We wanted to explode the space between digital and physical, we wanted to explore new auction mechanics, we wanted to explore the possibilities and create a work/collection that is complete as a whole from the viewpoint of the physical and the digital with photography spanning both.
Then this evolution is reversed and dropped as a collection.
 
Creation order:
The Canvas --> The Mechanism --> The Moment --> The Auction
  • The Canvas stage of the drop provides multiple layers of textures. It's the process of painting, it's the process of the traditional creation.
  • The Mechanism combines these into a digital object, and algorithmically combines.
  • The Moment realizes the final creation is a virtual-physical object, appreciates its existence, and explores that world photographically.
  • Open editions make the works meet the crowds.
So, in reverse order, the release:
 
Open Editions
The Moment
The Mechanism
The Canvas
  • We go back from the digital back to the traditional
  • We start with many editions. And "Sense". The auction. The audience. The product. The crowd (the open editions)
  • "Sense" is broken down to its pieces, allowing collectors to own and appreciate the "Moments" in it.
  • Then we go back to the Mechanism, which creates the geometry, the virtual object, the apparatus. This stage of the collection has a glimpse of "the physical", providing 1/1 prints
  •  Then we go back to the ultimate traditional, and the physical, back to the Canvas.
  • Each stage of the drop is designed carefully, with many considerations in mind.

2. The Collection

Open Editions // 3 x [n/n]
The Moment // 18 x [1/1]
The Mechanism // 6 x [1/1]

Each Mechanism comes with a physical 1/1 print 80 x 80 cm
Mechanism Prints // 6 x [1/1]
The Canvas // 6 x [1/1]

The Canvas NFTs come with the physical oil painting
Physical paintings, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm (unframed)
“Give me a museum and I'll fill it.”

Picasso was a prolific artist, an innovator (the creator of Cubism along with Braque); painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and considered one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century.
“I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.” 

Basquiat was first discovered as a graffiti artist but began to develop his style as more Neo-Expressionist with a primitive, expressive approach. He collaborated extensively with Warhol and this relationship was hugely beneficial but in ways debilitating as the New York art scene and critics regarded Basquiat as nothing more than a ‘talentless hustler’, riding the coattails of the famous Warhol. 
“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.”
​
O’Keeffe was most well known for her paintings of flowers and desert landscapes and was regarded as a pioneer in the development of modern art in America. She explored simplifying shapes and forms from the natural world translating them with paint into ways that represented her feelings/emotions. 
“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” 
​
Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her uncompromising colourful self-portraits that dealt with themes including gender, the human body, and death. She developed a naïve folk art style that visually underpinned autobiographical elements through fantasy and realism. 
“I don't do drugs. I am drugs.” 

Dali was a Spanish surrealist, a precocious genius, and a showman. He was a key driver of the surrealist movement, renowned for his technical skill and bizarre images, which were mostly based on his interest in classicism, mysticism, and modern scientific developments
“Art is what you can get away with.” 

Warhol was an artist and filmmaker, an initiator of the Pop art movement of the 1960s whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the United States. He projected a concept of the artist as an impersonal, ‘vacuous’ figure who is nevertheless a successful celebrity, businessman, and social climber.