This work was exhibited at Superzoom Gallery in Paris (October 2021) for the show Portraits Of The 21st Century. The NFT was acquired alongside the physical tapestry through the gallery. A versatile artist, a central figure in London’s digital avant-garde, an abstract portraitist with a passion for the techniques of the classical masters, Ry David Bradley (b.1979) is a multidisciplinary alien in the contemporary art world. It is impossible to reduce his work to a single definition as it is so plural. It is both a photograph taken on the spot, of friends or faces that intrigue him, but also a digital file as he reworks it on his graphic tablet. The creation then becomes fungible, cryptographic, virtual, like the NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) that are gradually taking hold in the art world and on the blockchain. At the end of the road, the work ends up finding its physical dimension in a Japanese workshop where ephemeral microscopic pixels become large tapestries that will last for centuries. In a radical move for the Paris show the works are available in both ways — the original painting file minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain via SuperRare, and the physical tapestry on the gallery wall, both of which are available together in a single click via MetaMask. Ry David Bradley plays with the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, while creating a parallel between the digital algorithm of a Photoshop file and the codes of a loom. Behind the two versions of the work, thousands of data, networks, links, are hidden. As you can see, there are as many ways of looking at, apprehending and understanding the work as there are of conceiving it. Up close, the composition’s essence espcapes us as we lose ourselves in the pixelated infinity of a super-zoomed low-definition image. We need to step back, to move away, to better perceive the tapestry in its entirety. Then everything makes sense and, between the red, green and blue threads, a 3.0 impression emerges.
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