F L O W I N G //
Quote from CohentheWriter on 20. October 2022, 20:46Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xfaafdc07907ff5120a76b34b731b278c38d6043c&token=36411184310952956002232840068403093147099009545148953600374741743982847459332&page=5
Source Link: https://rarible.com/token/0xfaafdc07907ff5120a76b34b731b278c38d6043c:36411184310952956002232840068403093147099009545148953600374741743982847459334?tab=overview
Date Minted: April 13, 2020
Artist Description: Infinitely curious about the end. What happens next? You ask yourself this same question every night as you drift deeply into slumber. And when you wake, one day it will be different— You will know. Your purpose has been made clear. Your peace has been found. And in this moment, you begin to flow back into the universe, atom by atom, surrounded by the warmth and light of your memories.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Scattered throughout Danil Pan’s oeuvre on Rarible (and on SuperRare too) are what we could call the “Conceptual and Abstract skyscape artist’s” // series. Not all of their works are such elaborate abstract compositions, but only those which are come equipped with the “//” in their titles. The majesty of this sub-collection of Pan’s is that there’s no one single way that the abstraction takes form. Sometimes they take the shape of reflected geometric landscapes, something like a broken mirror reflecting back an interior world. Others contain gardens and pools glossed over with digitally-abstract filters. F L O W I N G //, meanwhile, combines these two styles and overlays them over a composition which centers a recognizable, though hauntingly and mathematically deconstructed, natural object. Pan is often interested in the natural world, despite their self-described “skyscape” artistry. Although, what with so many of these works seeming to be situated in some dreamlike cloudscape of a world, perhaps it’s our internal understanding of “skyscape” that’s the problem here; it’s not Pan’s fault that we (I) associate that word with skyscrapers and city sights. Nevertheless, there’s an irony in pieces like F L O W I N G // between the overtly natural imagery and the very obvious technological processes which were used to doctor these pieces. Rarely —if ever— does Pan use digital techniques to destroy the underlying essences of their natural imagery, but marries them in clever and, dare I say, deific ways to draw out their under-evoked beauty. I think of what the Buddha said: ““If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.” Pan does their best to expose that miracle, and indeed, in a piece like F L O W I N G //, our perception of the single flower changes. Now if only we can extend that understanding to every single flower, we’d be getting somewhere. For now, one will do.
What a lovely flower this one is, though. Seeming to be some kind of pink orchid, its three sprouted flowers veer off in different directions, two of them ensconced in some kind of rapturous white light, one which obscures their tips, and the other with its petals stretched out wide. The three flowers descend down into a darkly-green stem, thick and reminding me of a pineapple’s spikes, that is unceremoniously cut off midway down the frame. It does not extend to the frame’s edges; it is sliced in two, and the bottom part falls out of our sight. This sense of unceremonious cutting is central to the piece itself, as all over the orchid otherwise —the stems and petals together— are a series of geometric knife slices. The invisible knife has already done its work within this piece, segmenting the orchid into ~12 segments, some huge and others teeny tiny pieces of a fraction of the stem. There is no rhyme or reason as to how the cut-marks travel throughout the orchid, though they do seem to be following some underlying geometric logic that we can only hint at; the lines are invisible when they aren’t bisecting pieces of the flower. Placed just behind the flower itself are two long rectangular boxes, one pink-lined and the other blue, reflecting the predominant colors of the orchid and of the background respectively. Around the orchid, 20 or so floating white orbs hang in the air, perhaps being expressed by the orchid itself; or perhaps they’re just bursts of light; or perhaps they’re even damages to the frame itself ala film reels suffering a burn effect. The entire scene is set upon an ethereal, even faery-like background, as cotton candy breezes of faint turquoise and even fainter magenta swirl lightly behind the orchid and everything else. In the upper-left corner, as is customary with Pan’s // artworks, the title of the piece is written in thin white letters, though it too has been sliced down the middle, its two segments slightly set off from one another, with the two “//” markings placed just slightly underneath.
Echoing my past sentiment, Pan’s actions do not actually destroy the careful beauty of the orchid, but set it in a new light. The fragility of the flower itself is highlighted by the careful slices drawn through it, as is our human tendency to make patterns out of objects. We can tell inherently that the pieces of the orchid still create one larger whole, even if various pieces have empty space between them and are disconnected from the full picture. It’s like Pan has created an ecosystem in its own right, though we imbue it with life ourselves, drawing from our natural pattern-making abilities. We see the thing as a single continuous whole even though it is now made up of many fractioned parts.
It’s a very top-down view of the object, the same one we feel when we identify collection of murky waters, lilypads and duckweeds, reeds and crocodiles and mosquitos and dense mangrove trees as a “swamp.” We can’t help but create a unified picture out of a thing, even if, by doing so, we are overlooking or even erasing the individual aspects of that thing’s true nature. The miraculous part lies in the central question: Does a thing retain its essence even when broken into pieces? Is Theseus’ original ship —deconstructed board-by-rotted-board and rebuilt, piece-by-new-piece, until not a single original board remains— still his ship? Does F L O W I N G // actually contain the flower we thought it did? Smartly, Pan leaves us to answer the question. Ever the provocateur, Pan merely poses it.
Date Minted: April 13, 2020
Artist Description: Infinitely curious about the end. What happens next? You ask yourself this same question every night as you drift deeply into slumber. And when you wake, one day it will be different— You will know. Your purpose has been made clear. Your peace has been found. And in this moment, you begin to flow back into the universe, atom by atom, surrounded by the warmth and light of your memories.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Scattered throughout Danil Pan’s oeuvre on Rarible (and on SuperRare too) are what we could call the “Conceptual and Abstract skyscape artist’s” // series. Not all of their works are such elaborate abstract compositions, but only those which are come equipped with the “//” in their titles. The majesty of this sub-collection of Pan’s is that there’s no one single way that the abstraction takes form. Sometimes they take the shape of reflected geometric landscapes, something like a broken mirror reflecting back an interior world. Others contain gardens and pools glossed over with digitally-abstract filters. F L O W I N G //, meanwhile, combines these two styles and overlays them over a composition which centers a recognizable, though hauntingly and mathematically deconstructed, natural object. Pan is often interested in the natural world, despite their self-described “skyscape” artistry. Although, what with so many of these works seeming to be situated in some dreamlike cloudscape of a world, perhaps it’s our internal understanding of “skyscape” that’s the problem here; it’s not Pan’s fault that we (I) associate that word with skyscrapers and city sights. Nevertheless, there’s an irony in pieces like F L O W I N G // between the overtly natural imagery and the very obvious technological processes which were used to doctor these pieces. Rarely —if ever— does Pan use digital techniques to destroy the underlying essences of their natural imagery, but marries them in clever and, dare I say, deific ways to draw out their under-evoked beauty. I think of what the Buddha said: ““If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.” Pan does their best to expose that miracle, and indeed, in a piece like F L O W I N G //, our perception of the single flower changes. Now if only we can extend that understanding to every single flower, we’d be getting somewhere. For now, one will do.
What a lovely flower this one is, though. Seeming to be some kind of pink orchid, its three sprouted flowers veer off in different directions, two of them ensconced in some kind of rapturous white light, one which obscures their tips, and the other with its petals stretched out wide. The three flowers descend down into a darkly-green stem, thick and reminding me of a pineapple’s spikes, that is unceremoniously cut off midway down the frame. It does not extend to the frame’s edges; it is sliced in two, and the bottom part falls out of our sight. This sense of unceremonious cutting is central to the piece itself, as all over the orchid otherwise —the stems and petals together— are a series of geometric knife slices. The invisible knife has already done its work within this piece, segmenting the orchid into ~12 segments, some huge and others teeny tiny pieces of a fraction of the stem. There is no rhyme or reason as to how the cut-marks travel throughout the orchid, though they do seem to be following some underlying geometric logic that we can only hint at; the lines are invisible when they aren’t bisecting pieces of the flower. Placed just behind the flower itself are two long rectangular boxes, one pink-lined and the other blue, reflecting the predominant colors of the orchid and of the background respectively. Around the orchid, 20 or so floating white orbs hang in the air, perhaps being expressed by the orchid itself; or perhaps they’re just bursts of light; or perhaps they’re even damages to the frame itself ala film reels suffering a burn effect. The entire scene is set upon an ethereal, even faery-like background, as cotton candy breezes of faint turquoise and even fainter magenta swirl lightly behind the orchid and everything else. In the upper-left corner, as is customary with Pan’s // artworks, the title of the piece is written in thin white letters, though it too has been sliced down the middle, its two segments slightly set off from one another, with the two “//” markings placed just slightly underneath.
Echoing my past sentiment, Pan’s actions do not actually destroy the careful beauty of the orchid, but set it in a new light. The fragility of the flower itself is highlighted by the careful slices drawn through it, as is our human tendency to make patterns out of objects. We can tell inherently that the pieces of the orchid still create one larger whole, even if various pieces have empty space between them and are disconnected from the full picture. It’s like Pan has created an ecosystem in its own right, though we imbue it with life ourselves, drawing from our natural pattern-making abilities. We see the thing as a single continuous whole even though it is now made up of many fractioned parts.
It’s a very top-down view of the object, the same one we feel when we identify collection of murky waters, lilypads and duckweeds, reeds and crocodiles and mosquitos and dense mangrove trees as a “swamp.” We can’t help but create a unified picture out of a thing, even if, by doing so, we are overlooking or even erasing the individual aspects of that thing’s true nature. The miraculous part lies in the central question: Does a thing retain its essence even when broken into pieces? Is Theseus’ original ship —deconstructed board-by-rotted-board and rebuilt, piece-by-new-piece, until not a single original board remains— still his ship? Does F L O W I N G // actually contain the flower we thought it did? Smartly, Pan leaves us to answer the question. Ever the provocateur, Pan merely poses it.