Me, Alvaro and Jorge
Quote from CohentheWriter on 26. September 2022, 22:08Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xb932a70A57673d89f4acfFBE830E8ed7f75Fb9e0&token=31991&page=5
Source Link: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/me,-alvaro-and-jorge-31991
Date Minted: January 25, 2022
Artist Description: This scene is a little part of a dream in which I was in an infinite party. We are the three components of the band we had when young, and tonight is the night. it's 5 AM. All the people in the frame is drunk.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Now this is interesting: In February of 2021, artist Nacho Frades mints a piece called Drunks, a mind-bending painting of three friends —including the artist— drunk and sitting on some steps outside of a bar and drawn in a style merging a Post-Impressionist aesthetic with a Cubist disruption of form. It’s really quite a powerful piece, and quite idiosyncratic, and reveals Frades as a keen observer of the human form, an incredible visual storyteller, and a gifted selector of colors; here a wall is trisected into red and green and yellow segments; skin colors are captured in ghostly pallor and in a sickly yellow, street-lamp-inflected state; clothing ranges in color tone, and so do things under sway of shadow, tucked into corners. But Drunks isn’t the object of our attention today; though, actually, in a way, it is. The piece truthfully before us today, Me, Alvaro and Jorge, was minted nearly a year after Drunks, and doesn’t just seem to continue its predecessor’s story, but actually overtly codifies the imagery of Drunks as a segment within a larger composition. There, in the bottom right corner of Me, Alvaro and Jorge is the entirety of Drunks, (only the color palette is a bit darker) though the world we see expanded here is so much greater: physically larger, more energetic, more curious, more alive! Experimenting further with this dialogue between two great artistic traditions, and adding in a touch of surrealism for good measure, Frades’ updated piece is a triumph, a lesson in art history, and a deeply evocative piece, unlike anything I’ve seen in crypto art elsewhere.
The new Me, Alvaro and Jorge is more representative of Frades’ modernist interests. Frades’ initial explorations seemed to scatter themselves across many different art techniques and tones. But no matter whether he was working with pencil drawings, 3D sculpture, or various animations, from the beginning Frades revealed a continuing interest in architecture. We see so many landscapes scattered sporadically through Frades’ early works. And then there comes a point when his entire SuperRare oeuvre veers towards a new and nearly complete architectural focus. I suppose you could call this Frades’ modern period, and it is within this epoch that Me, Alvaro and Jorge sits. But now we must turn to aesthetics, for in this piece —and in so much of Frades’ recent work— is an evocation not just of place and emotion, but of history. It’s not only a dialogue he’s having with the great masters of the past —Van Gogh, Munsch, Picasso—, it’s a demonic possession, and it’s their world, in a way, that Frades is somehow channeling.
Now that we’ve expanded Drunks’ initial purview, we can see that the three friends, of which Frades is —according to Drunks’ Artist Description— on the right, are indeed sitting on the steps to a bar, and an open-air one at that. There are three people still at the bar, their inebriation indicated by the goopy looseness with which their arms and legs are splayed, stringbeany and with cooked spaghetti’s lack of bone density, in various states of alertness, in various states of smoking, the bar itself composed of a green, emerald-like bartop, a few bottles of something-or-other sitting atop it, and a room that stretches upwards into an implied distance, its back wall covered in seemingly non-sequitur graffiti. Frades’ past and future architectural works all involve a healthy dose of Post-impressionist play with space, with the sanctity of line, with depth and perception. So much of that is centralized here, whether we’re talking about the bar itself, a curving structure pointed upwards, the depth effect warping everything else —people included— within; or whether we’ve turned our attention towards the greater world, which appears as if we’re seeing it out of a fish-eye lens, with exaggerated space and grandiosity the closer to the center of the image we are, and a diminishment of everything at the edge of the frame. On the right side, that means Frades and his friends. On the left, it’s a tiny little man sitting on a faraway sidewalk, bottle beside him, alongside a purple-and-blue implication of the far-off city’s neon revelry. Unlike that part of the city, this smaller, closer scene is cloaked in colors like orange and yellow and red, creating —to me— the impression of a Mediterranean city, perhaps Barcelona, and certainly it seems to evoke the same sun-scorched nostalgia for Frades’ native Spain that, say, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises does. There’s so much in this piece that channels those early 20th-century writers, whether intentionally or not, in that great drunken mishmash of artistry and literature that characterized the decade following World War I in Europe.
And in the same vein as all that past artistry —one in which much of the drunkenness and debauchery was a coping mechanism for all the newfound horrors the world was introduced to via the war— there’s an undercurrent of menace and pain in this piece. It’s communicated tacitly, through the bending and distorted nature of the world and its inhabitants. It’s communicated less tacitly through the composition of the people themselves, how they are, yes, drunk, but also demented, their faces elongated or crumpled or seemingly sick. And then the little man in the corner, off alone, clinging to his bottle, forgotten completely by the party at hand. Whom here are we meant to identify with? Whom here is most in need of our sympathy?
Source Link: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/me,-alvaro-and-jorge-31991
Date Minted: January 25, 2022
Artist Description: This scene is a little part of a dream in which I was in an infinite party. We are the three components of the band we had when young, and tonight is the night. it's 5 AM. All the people in the frame is drunk.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Now this is interesting: In February of 2021, artist Nacho Frades mints a piece called Drunks, a mind-bending painting of three friends —including the artist— drunk and sitting on some steps outside of a bar and drawn in a style merging a Post-Impressionist aesthetic with a Cubist disruption of form. It’s really quite a powerful piece, and quite idiosyncratic, and reveals Frades as a keen observer of the human form, an incredible visual storyteller, and a gifted selector of colors; here a wall is trisected into red and green and yellow segments; skin colors are captured in ghostly pallor and in a sickly yellow, street-lamp-inflected state; clothing ranges in color tone, and so do things under sway of shadow, tucked into corners. But Drunks isn’t the object of our attention today; though, actually, in a way, it is. The piece truthfully before us today, Me, Alvaro and Jorge, was minted nearly a year after Drunks, and doesn’t just seem to continue its predecessor’s story, but actually overtly codifies the imagery of Drunks as a segment within a larger composition. There, in the bottom right corner of Me, Alvaro and Jorge is the entirety of Drunks, (only the color palette is a bit darker) though the world we see expanded here is so much greater: physically larger, more energetic, more curious, more alive! Experimenting further with this dialogue between two great artistic traditions, and adding in a touch of surrealism for good measure, Frades’ updated piece is a triumph, a lesson in art history, and a deeply evocative piece, unlike anything I’ve seen in crypto art elsewhere.
The new Me, Alvaro and Jorge is more representative of Frades’ modernist interests. Frades’ initial explorations seemed to scatter themselves across many different art techniques and tones. But no matter whether he was working with pencil drawings, 3D sculpture, or various animations, from the beginning Frades revealed a continuing interest in architecture. We see so many landscapes scattered sporadically through Frades’ early works. And then there comes a point when his entire SuperRare oeuvre veers towards a new and nearly complete architectural focus. I suppose you could call this Frades’ modern period, and it is within this epoch that Me, Alvaro and Jorge sits. But now we must turn to aesthetics, for in this piece —and in so much of Frades’ recent work— is an evocation not just of place and emotion, but of history. It’s not only a dialogue he’s having with the great masters of the past —Van Gogh, Munsch, Picasso—, it’s a demonic possession, and it’s their world, in a way, that Frades is somehow channeling.
Now that we’ve expanded Drunks’ initial purview, we can see that the three friends, of which Frades is —according to Drunks’ Artist Description— on the right, are indeed sitting on the steps to a bar, and an open-air one at that. There are three people still at the bar, their inebriation indicated by the goopy looseness with which their arms and legs are splayed, stringbeany and with cooked spaghetti’s lack of bone density, in various states of alertness, in various states of smoking, the bar itself composed of a green, emerald-like bartop, a few bottles of something-or-other sitting atop it, and a room that stretches upwards into an implied distance, its back wall covered in seemingly non-sequitur graffiti. Frades’ past and future architectural works all involve a healthy dose of Post-impressionist play with space, with the sanctity of line, with depth and perception. So much of that is centralized here, whether we’re talking about the bar itself, a curving structure pointed upwards, the depth effect warping everything else —people included— within; or whether we’ve turned our attention towards the greater world, which appears as if we’re seeing it out of a fish-eye lens, with exaggerated space and grandiosity the closer to the center of the image we are, and a diminishment of everything at the edge of the frame. On the right side, that means Frades and his friends. On the left, it’s a tiny little man sitting on a faraway sidewalk, bottle beside him, alongside a purple-and-blue implication of the far-off city’s neon revelry. Unlike that part of the city, this smaller, closer scene is cloaked in colors like orange and yellow and red, creating —to me— the impression of a Mediterranean city, perhaps Barcelona, and certainly it seems to evoke the same sun-scorched nostalgia for Frades’ native Spain that, say, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises does. There’s so much in this piece that channels those early 20th-century writers, whether intentionally or not, in that great drunken mishmash of artistry and literature that characterized the decade following World War I in Europe.
And in the same vein as all that past artistry —one in which much of the drunkenness and debauchery was a coping mechanism for all the newfound horrors the world was introduced to via the war— there’s an undercurrent of menace and pain in this piece. It’s communicated tacitly, through the bending and distorted nature of the world and its inhabitants. It’s communicated less tacitly through the composition of the people themselves, how they are, yes, drunk, but also demented, their faces elongated or crumpled or seemingly sick. And then the little man in the corner, off alone, clinging to his bottle, forgotten completely by the party at hand. Whom here are we meant to identify with? Whom here is most in need of our sympathy?