Mint by Mint is where we sit down with an artist and walk through their own work, piece by piece. First up, Santiago. Six hand picked pieces and a lifetime of practice sitting behind them.
antiago Márquez specialises in images that refuse to resolve. Shapes that almost become a figure and then don't, colours that sit somewhere between a printing error and a weather system, edges left visibly cut rather than blended away. He calls the results landscapes, though not of anywhere you could stand. They're landscapes of a state of mind.
He works from Montevideo, five to ten hours a day, most days.
He paints by hand, photographs the result, breaks it into vector shapes, mangles it, feeds parts of it through a model, prints it, cuts it up, draws back over it, scans it again. The output is enormous. Thousands of works spread across a dozen accounts on half a dozen platforms, many of them priced little higher than a coffee.
He trained as an abstract painter. Before that, he was a published poet.
To understand how these images arrive where they do, we asked him to choose six pieces and tell us what went into them. He talked about the Cold War, about being fifteen and drunk at a party, about bodies as bubbles, and about the thing nobody ever asks a prolific artist: how do you know when a piece is finished?
"NFTs have allowed me to find a point when something is done, cause I mint it and somehow make a public birth of that piece of art I guess. I could keep working on any of them but it's a nice thing, to have that punctuation mark, that event of minting."
He could keep going on any of these forever. Minting is the full stop. Every piece below is a moment he decided to let go, and that is what you are actually looking at.
His answers run below in his own words.
(We recommend viewing each work in its original presentation by clicking the image. The reproductions here cannot fully retain the depth, texture and detail visible at their intended resolution.)
Vector. PNG, 16,440 × 10,000. ERC-721 on Ethereum via SuperRare. Collected by batsoupyumvault.
Q - Everything you make circles language, you have a collection called 'loss of language.' If language is what's being lost, what's left in the image once it's gone?
What remains can’t be pointed at, and also, what remains, can’t be separated one item from the next one, one territory from the next one. Without this determination and opposition that tells me what’s the limit of each thing, and what makes it not the next thing, what is left is, the feeling of alert, I guess a kind of fear too.
Some abstract works of art seem to be just one texture, one big stain, a gesture.
On the other side more geometrical and minimal works of non figurative art feel like about the statement, and the choice.
On one hand, the expressionist side of abstract art says “only this person in this precise time and place can do this particular work of art and this couldn’t have been done in any other different thing”. While a more computable, minimal, geometrical side, maybe says “this shape/this configuration, could have been done anywhere by anyone in several different ways but let’s look at how I am doing it now and why and who I am, what’s my personal history or the position of my group historically, politically”.
Another opposition always present in these works, to me, and in my opinion, is, what happened around abstract expressionism vs socialist realism, and before that, the first abstract artist being expelled from the USSR.
My personal feeling is that every time something evoques abstract expressionism and looks in some way like quoting it, what is being said is “let’s talk about the cold war”.
And what can we say about this? I am not sure haha
I have feelings about history and politics, more than serious stances and opinions.
About representation and figurative/ non figurative duality, I believe that the richest territory to explore for me right now is the gradient from almost figurative to almost non figurative.
I feel like the problem of language, or, the field opened by the question about language, is a source from where art can get a lot of things, and a place to wander where art can be a very fun tool to have close to us.
[medium, dimensions] ERC-721 on Ethereum via SuperRare.
Q - 2001ish me' makes it a memory of a person as much as a place. You'd have been about fifteen. What was going on for you then that ended up in this piece?
I was 15 indeed, I was drunk, I remember going to a place with friends, many things collide in that memory, I was at the time hanging out every day with kids a bit older and I had a very low status in their group, they used to make me shut up and things like that. It was horrible haha.
Collage of AI outputs, made in GIMP. Tezos via Objkt, minted August 16, 2022, as @neymrqz.
Q - You published the prompts to make clear the art wasn't there, then said maybe part of it is. Where did you land?
Where is the art with AI art, right?
I like to think that something that is good can be made at plain sight. Like an idea is stolen and someone feels sad but ideally, this original creator should be able to come up with more. And this thief can't come up with more, I guess. I know in reality it's not that way, feelings are hurt, people get sad or angry, ideas are in fact stolen by greedy or lazy people, sometimes.
I felt angry or sad sometimes for seeing some of my visual ideas just used superficially, but for the most I feel happy when I see others have made something that could only exist if they crossed my work.
About text to image and the relationships between text and images, it's always crazy, inadequate, distorted. This broken communication is similar to the problem with language that we touched on before but also, has so much of each one of us individually, and so much of each group of people, each culture, each moment in internet history.
Blender meshes, ink, pencil, scanned paper, vectored drawings, layered. Tezos via Objkt, as @neymrqz.
Q - You said this is criminally underrated. Tell us the full story of making it, the scanning, the printing, the cutting, the layering, everything you did to it. What went into this piece that people may miss when seeing this?
Well there’s little pieces of blender meshes, ink, pencil, I think there’s transparent paper scanned too?. I also vectored some drawings I have made on gimp,. I added all those things as layers and created a very decent thickness of subsequent realms in the Z direction.
I respect that I said “criminally underrated” haha
I love English language, it’s not my first language but I have studied or used it since very little.
I think ALL of my work is criminally underrated!! haha
I love about this one that it’s a bit a body, looks like a body, and a body is a bubble, isn’t it? a limit, a boundary. There’s many species of bacteria, fungi, little plants and animals, in a big bag, and we are like the main one and put a name to it and go around saying hey is this icecream real? am I allowed to ark here etc
[medium, dimensions] Tezos via Objkt.
Q - You were a published poet before you stopped. Are these descriptions the poetry still coming out, just somewhere else? If so, is your work inspired from art or is the art inspired by your poem?
I think I was a very bad poet haha. That's why I stopped.
I love writing these, but they don't change the image making I think. I write either the long titles or the descriptions or sometimes zero words and one emoji, after finishing the visual pieces. It's like a way to finish them.
NFTs have allowed me to find a point when something is done, cause I mint it and somehow make a public birth of that piece of art I guess. I could keep working on any of them but it's a nice thing, to have that punctuation mark, that event of minting. And the titles work as part of that for me.
It's a bit more tiring for my brain, writing than making images, so I can do it like once or twice and I feel exhausted of what my brain had to do.
Vector, sources include AI. PNG, 10,746 × 10,000. ERC-721 on Ethereum via SuperRare. Listed at 1 ETH.
Q - I fell in love with this piece at first sight: the colours, the expressions of everything that somehow feels exactly right. You left it without a word, so this last one is yours.
this work like many others I have done, is a product of vectoring using inkscape and changing the colors and positions of the vector shapes, like in a game called tangram they used here for educational purposes. Or like toys assembled. And also, a quote to print making and printing errors and some nostalgia for the world of physical items as main world.
Time is the window itself.
But also when I minted that I was using the name time, both on twitter and superrare and everywhere. So it’s me seen from the window.
the image I used and vectored is an AI output, that was already product of many steps of merging one thing with other, including drawings and other AI generated images.
Santiago is @ttiimmees. His work is on Objkt and SuperRare, with some pieces minted as @neymrqz. More at santiagoney.xyz.
Covering crypto art and NFT culture. Curated, vetted, free to read.