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REMO genesis no 1 : Dead Still Ver

Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430&token=51114&page=5

Source Link: https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430/51114

Date Minted:  October 19, 2020

Artist Description: Stiff Halloween Edition : Graffiti, Street Style and Pop Art fused with the digital world of NFTs. REMO’s gallery work and murals come to your wallet. Be no 1, the first to own these rare collectables by the celebrated artist.

Rare! includes high res version

CohentheWriter’s Commentary:

What a blast. REMO genesis no 1 : Dead Still Ver is a take no prisoners kind of collage. Like a paper overrun with doodles and then plucked out of a notebook, there’s no seeming sense at first to the massive amount of varied symbols REMOGRAPHY chooses to populate their artwork with, though with some insight and a little bit of elbow grease, I’m sure some sense will emerge. But that’s a beautiful thing for a collage to ask of us. It’s not just an artwork, it’s an automatic invitation to something greater. Humans are pattern-making creatures, and the best collage unveils itself like a kind of game. “Can you figure me out?” it seems to taunt us. The artistic equivalent of a Sphinxian riddle. REMOGRAPHY’s symbols range from the militaristic to the economic, from cartoon characters to mathematical symbols and equations. They are drawn in styles ranging from the realistic to the stick-figure-esque. It’s a collage of the highest order that doesn’t merely entreat us with objects, but with all manner of styles and sensibilities, varying messages and varying intents. We weave our way through the dense hodgepodge of symbols in REMO genesis no 1 : Dead Still Ver, and the pathway we choose to use is going to change the highly-personalized meaning of the piece. REMOGRAPHY gives us hints, gives us their own preferred path, using size to focus our gaze, but offers no more help than that esoteric little bit. 

I’m tempted to say that REMOGRAPHY also uses color to help direct our attention, with so many tiny details and little characters are slick with red paint, plus little globules of red splashed over sections of the piece like wayward blood. There are really two objects fighting for our immediate attention; both are huge and both are much different in composition than anything else herein (except perhaps for each other). The first that catches my own eye is the giant, red, dripping Bitcoin symbol in the bottom left of the piece. The way it’s situated there, and the way its paint-like style makes me think of a signature, and the way its style is stencil-based as opposed to hand-drawn, are all very interesting to me. There aren’t really any analogues for it elsewhere in the piece. Besides that, it’s pretty stark and violent. The implications of that symbol alone are clear: Bitcoin is violent; that, or it’s steeped in violence even if not of its own making. And that flows into the other main symbol, the well-shaded skull in the piece’s center, flattened and quite toothy. Plenty of skulls elsewhere in the piece, as well as other implications of war. Knives. The radio isotope symbol. Long, thin arrows that fly across the piece like missiles. Finger guns. Space invaders and lightning bolts. Nothing that inherently denotes danger, but many things that suggest it. And the red splatters in the bottom left of the screen only emphasize that notion. But then you step back, and you begin deconstructing the symbols individually, and none seem so malignant. I mean, there are plenty of benign things as well! A crown. A silly-looking robot cartoon. A list of different colors (turn the piece upside-down to read). Stars and squiggles. So we start to doubt our own implications. We doubt our eyes. We question why we’re so quick to see violence in nonviolent situations. We wonder what the hell is wrong with us. Is the world really as pessimistic a place as we imagine it is, or have we just primed ourselves to see it all wrong?

That is, for me, a huge draw towards abstract and collage art. Because of its subjectivity, such art acts as a weird kind of funhouse mirror, quietly pointing us towards certain conclusions but then asking us to question what within us caused those conclusions to form. The artist acts as a kind of noetic provocateur, filling us with certain emotions and then mocking us for having those emotions in the first place. So now we’re wondering (I’m wondering) whether emotions come more from within or more from outside stimuli. 

And a piece like REMO genesis no 1 : Dead Still Ver makes us wonder about the various powers of different symbols. Why do certain symbols like the blood and the skulls affect us into certain ideas more than the counterbalance of other imagery? Why, even when this piece is so reminiscent of a doodle-stuffed notebook page, do we still feel so much menace pulsing off of it? As far as I see it, there are two options. If we trust that REMOGRAPHY is a skilled manipulator of the composition, and thus a skilled manipulator of its observers, then we can rest easy in the fact that we’ve simply been manipulated. The subterranean methods of directing our attention have distracted us long enough that, before we know it, we’ve turned inward. That, or the artist in this case is a conduit, and the very act of creating collage forces our self-doubts and ego-trips to emerge. It could well be a power we hand-deliver to the artist just as soon as we commit to spending extra time with their works. We’ve just been misdirected so well that we don’t realize such power has changed hands. An artist pickpocket.

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