Freddie Mercury lives again in the form of four stunning NFTs

Freddie Mercury lives again in the form of four stunning NFTs

Virginia Valenzuela Sep 20, 2021 Artist Statements

“Sanctuary”

Freddie Mercury lives again in the form of four stunning NFTs

3 years ago
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landside,
No escape from reality.
Open your eyes,
Look up to the skies and see.
I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy,
Because I’m easy come, easy go,
Little high, little low,
Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to
Me, to me.

— “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, lyrics by Freddie Mercury

Anyone who knows rock music, glam fashion, queer culture, or karaoke knows who Freddie Mercury is. Regarded as one of the greatest singers and songwriters in the history of rock music, his iconic outfits, stage presence, and killer four-octave range revolutionized industries, changed lives, and touched the hearts of millions. 

September 5 would have been Freddie’s 75th birthday, and this year The Mercury Phoenix Trust launched a brand new collection of artworks dedicated to his life’s work, image, and memory. Founded by Queen band members Brian May, Roger Taylor and their manager Jim Beach in memory of Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS in 1991, all sales will benefit AIDS research, education, and awareness projects in developing countries worldwide.

The four-piece collection, which goes up for auction today, features the works of MBSJQ, Chad Knight, Blake Kathryn, and Mat Maitland, all of whom sat down with SuperRare to discuss their contributions to this fundraising campaign as well as their love of Freddie Mercury.

MBSJQ

“Colorful Soul” by MBSJQ

“Freddie has always been part of my life, during childhood my sister used to play, dance and sing to Queen. Freddie’s voice was like no other. The joy & happinesses Freddie Mercury brought to our childhoods were an amazing influence & inspiration to ambition of achieving your dreams.”

“My favourite thing about Freddie was the fact he was just himself. AND PROUD OF IT. He was never scared to push the boundaries and this is how I can relate to him. If you are given a gift you must embrace it and share it with the world for all to enjoy.”

“The Freddie Mercury collaboration was the perfect fit for MBSJQ with the inclusion of vibrant colours and fantasy-like environments…it was a joy to bring my style of art to the memory of the legend himself.”

CHAD KNIGHT

“Celebration of Uniquity” by Chad Knight

“Freddie’s music inspired me long before I knew anything about him, but once I was exposed to him as an artist outside of Queen, I found his fearless acceptance of his identity incredibly inspiring. He was a pioneer of self expression and his resilience in not letting other people’s opinions of him impact his career or what he wanted to do lives on. He was very ahead of his time in that it’s rare to see someone embrace their [unique self] so strongly at a time when it was looked down upon. He’s a champion of self expression and I think has helped so many people feel comfortable in who they are.”

“For this piece, I wanted to capture his larger-than-life presence. Freddie was such a huge persona that I don’t know how his spirit even fit into a human body. When I tried to communicate what he meant to me, I wanted to make him into a giant since that’s always how I always saw him growing up. I also wanted to capture his challenges with fame and him at times losing sight of his goals due to the grandiosity of his reputation and wealth.”

BLAKE KATHRYN

“Sanctuary” by Blake Kathryn

“The extravagance in both his persona and performance elements is a quality I admired from Freddie since first impression. Upon beginning the creative process the team was so generous with providing focused insight into his history, musings and home that it created a dreamy mental space to honor him. [I learned about] his quieter side—his garden, piano, Victorian lodge—and it blended into a combination of a dream-space I’d hope he’d find peace within.”

“The charity component itself, going towards AIDS research, had me more than happy to contribute.”

MAT MAITLAND 

“Somebody to Love” by Mat Maitland

“I loved Freddie’s warm personality and charisma and this inspired me to approach my piece from a more human perspective, as opposed to depicting him as a performer. With this in mind I thought about the things that he loved and that orbited his personal life and featured them surrounding a romanticized central image of him.”

“I was aware that his 75th birthday was coming up and was honoured to be asked to create something for this NFT collection. Freddie Mercury’s life and personality have always fascinated me so it was easy to say yes. I was also happy to help and support the work of the Mercury Phoenix Trust.”

“You can do whatever you want with my work, just never make me boring.”
— Freddie Mercury

As The Mercury Phoenix Trust told SuperRare “Freddie was a lover of all forms of art. Starting with his studies in Fashion and Graphic Design, he went on to design the Queen crest as well as many of his own stage costumes. Queen and Freddie Mercury have always led the field visually as well as musically. From their invention of the promo video with Bohemian Rhapsody, to their show-stopping set designs and costumes, visual art has always been an integral part of their artistry.”

And so it is perhaps the most fitting homage to his life, death, and artistic spirit, to present such visually stimulating artworks in one of the most cutting-edge applications of blockchain technology to date. These NFTs, along with the award-winning biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), show us the many sides of one of the most beloved artists of modern time. But they also ensure that other people afflicted with AIDS won’t have to follow the same path. 

AIDS today is no longer a death sentence, unlike when Freddie Mercury died of AIDS-related causes in 1991. Research has advanced enormously and with access to the correct medication and care, a person in a developed country can expect to lead a fairly normal life. However, this is still not the case in developing countries, where access to the medication is far more complex and complicated and often prohibitively expensive. Education, awareness, and prevention therefore remain key in these countries, which is why the MPT largely focuses on funding educational projects in these countries. With the advent of Covid-19 and the worldwide pandemic that has ensued, a lot of this ground has been lost as many of these projects have been directly affected or put on hold. We hope to raise considerable funds for the Mercury Phoenix Trust in a time where our traditional yearly fundraising campaigns have been halted due to Covid restrictions.

— The Mercury Phoenix Trust

Just as his music saved lives with its poetic lyrics and magnetic musical arrangements, so too will his legacy continue to pour hope into the lives that need it most.

32

Virginia Valenzuela

Vinny is a writer from New York City whose work has been published in Wired, The Independent, High Times, Right Click Save, and the Best American Poetry Blog, and in 2022 she received the Future Art Writers Award from MOZAIK Philanthropy. She is SuperRare's Managing Editor.

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SuperRare Labs Curatorial Editor Linda Dounia Rebeiz interviews Ayla El Moussa about how she draws inspiration from the Renaissance period, how she approaches nude portraiture, and her “Painted Muse” Series on SuperRare.

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Androgynes in syncopated swirling blues and blooms: an interview with Clara Luzian

Androgynes in syncopated swirling blues and blooms: an interview with Clara Luzian

Chloé Harper Gold Aug 31, 2021 Artist Profiles

“Anesthesia”

Androgynes in syncopated swirling blues and blooms: an interview with Clara Luzian

3 years ago

A hand is the first thing we see. 

Surrounded by a translucent ribbon of blue, it looks like it’s reaching up from below the surface of a body of water. The hand, a pearlescent grey, is adorned with silver rings and long, sharp neon green fingernails.

The focus of Argentinian digital artist Clara Luzian’s recent work, “Visual Syncopation,” is a humanoid figure consisting of a head, neck, and a pair of arms. Below the neck appears to be a bralette held up by a collar with an O-Ring. Nothing fills out the clothing…and there’s nothing that attaches the arms to the neck. Indeed, our minds fill in the visual gaps between the body parts before we recognize that there are missing pieces. The subject’s head is hairless and its eyes are black underneath a pair of thick, bushy brows. Its tongue sticks out through its lips. 

“Visual Syncopation” by Render Fruit on SuperRare

The subject, surrounded by streams of blue as well as flowers tinged with the same shade of green as its fingernails, rotates in space. It’s not a smooth turn; it’s glitchy and rapidly back and forth—a literal rendering of the concept of “visual syncopation.” Smooth tones in a minor key punctuated by percussive beats accompany the work. 

“I started thinking of it from a musical concept coming from, well, syncopation, which is a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of the rhythm of music. There are changes your brain doesn’t expect,” Luzian explains. “I thought that could be interesting to work with: How would it be if I had to animate the concept of music syncopation? I’m so used to animating that I have a natural flow in my head of how animation should be. So I started messing with that in my head to create syncopation and then the music part came naturally because I also needed that for the piece.”

“It was like a “come and go” between the musical part and the visual part,” she adds. “It was fun.”

Stills from “Visual Syncopation”

The subject of “Visual Syncopation” is arresting in its form. Not only because of the absent body parts, but because the figure is completely and purely androgynous. The mannequin-like character has a seamless blend of traditionally feminine and masculine accessories and features…and a notable lack of discernible sex characteristics. Luzian shares that she started to interrogate the socially-prescribed binary of feminine and masculine in her own life a year ago. The act of questioning the construct of gender is present in much of Luzian’s work beyond “Visual Syncopation.”

“I prefer not to define a gender for my characters,” she says. “If you look at my past work, all of my characters are androgynes. I don’t want to drive the observer too much to see them from a binary perspective. I prefer to leave it.”

The other curious aspect of the work is how the subject is posed. Their arms are raised in the air and they are surrounded by swirling blues and blooms. It strikes as mythological and folkloric, witchy and yet also playful, like the character is manipulating water or even manipulating the overlaying sound itself. 

“Drama” by Render Fruit

Luzian described the pose, and the accompanying elements, as simply part of the syncopation. 

“You would expect the water to flow, you know?” she says. “But then it’s still and it’s a bit disturbing. And the colors—I’ve been having a huge urge to use bold colors. I’ve been using pastels for most of my works, but now I feel like I want to go for bolder colors.”

And the subject’s pose?

“I think we don’t understand what it’s doing. We don’t understand what the pose is. I just like that it has the tongue out—it’s trying to nail something, right?” she laughs.

Clara Luzian, also known as Render Fruit (“I’m vegan and I feel like my renders are fueled by plants and fruits and vegetables!”) has become notorious for pieces like “Visual Syncopation.” Her online portfolio is filled with digitally rendered works of surrealist art that suck you in and keep you staring at your screen. Many of her pieces are animated; others are stagnant. All of them are visually striking—trippy, even—and intensely haunting and extraterrestrial. Spending time with a piece by Luzian is like getting transported to and lost in a world that you would read about in a Tanith Lee novel. 

“Seen in Dreams” by Render Fruit on SuperRare

When asked about her sources of inspiration, Luzian says that everything just comes from her thoughts, however random they might be.

“It’s very chaotic,” she laughs. “[My inspiration comes from] a thought I had, something I wrote, something I read…there are so many triggers.”

Luzian has been creating art for ten years. Her background is in graphic design; she says that she got bored because the images were so still. 

“I started animating them in my head,” she remembers. She knew that she had to study animation, but at the time, there weren’t a lot of schools or programs for animation that were near her home. So, she taught herself. 

She started with Adobe After Effects and then moved onto Cinema 4D. Jumping into the 3D pool led her to where she is today.

Left: “HEALING RESOURCES,” Right: “Anesthesia”

Luzian’s first introduction to the realm of NFTs was in February 2019 with an email from the folks at MakersPlace. At the time, Luzian didn’t know what an NFT was, but made a profile with them anyway. Later that year, she was scouted by SuperRare and her career in the digital art space skyrocketed. 

“It has been the most crazy year I have had so far in my career,” she says. “But it’s fun. I really like how active the communities are. It’s a collective. I mean, people like me, working so many years in visual arts, we’re lonely people, you know? The economic side of things is amazing, of course, but the community is really vast and solid. It’s good to have company in an activity that has been very lonely.”

Community in the digital art scene is so special and so important to Luzian that she’s hesitant to name her favorite artists. 

“I have many, but I’m afraid I’ll forget someone!” she says. “I really admire Nicole Ruggiero, Alessio de Vecchi, and Fvckrender [to name just a few]. It’s a really talented community!”

In addition to finding community among fellow digital artists, there’s another appealing aspect of the NFT sector:

“There’s the constant feeling of [being in] something that is starting and [that is] going to be escalating for so many years,” she says. “I think about art movements: you have surrealism, expressionism, you have fauvism…you have crypto art. I really like to think about that.”
1

Chloé Harper Gold

Chloé Harper Gold is a writer and editor based in New York. Her work has been published in 71 Magazine, Honeysuckle Magazine, Nightmarish Conjurings, Horror Film Central, High Times, Dread Central, Crystal Lake Publishing's Shallow Waters Volume IV, and 100-Word Zombie Bites. Chloé received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School.

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The NFT as a self-portrait rendered one frame at a time: The genesis piece of Jake Fried

The NFT as a self-portrait rendered one frame at a time: The genesis piece of Jake Fried

A. Moret Aug 19, 2021 Artist Profiles

“Night Vision“

The NFT as a self-portrait rendered one frame at a time: The genesis piece of Jake Fried

3 years ago

Upon the simultaneous drop of the first note and opening frame of “Night Vision,” an experimental animation by Jake Fried, we are fully immersed within a black and white cinematic universe rich in texture and guided by a labyrinth of intricate geometric forms. 

“Night Vision”, a hand-drawn animation with ink and
white-out. Bid on it here.

Fried anchors the narrative at the center of the composition, where different permutations of an eye guide our perspective through a sequence of terrestrial and celestial landscapes that has no definitive beginning or end. The presence of the eye reflects the artist, who meditates over the surface for an extended period of time and witnesses its evolution from a blank slate to sedimented layers of ink and white-out. 

In conversation with SuperRare, Fried spoke to the cyclical nature of the work as a “mystery that unfolds and unlocks over time,” exploring every angle of the self from inner and outer spaces, and from the anatomical to the galactical. Along the edges of the frame, in our peripheral vision atmospheric layers expand and contract gradually moving toward the edges, filling the entire visual plane until the cycle begins again. The fluidity of motion and the rapid pace at which the animation plays, veils the complexity, rigor and time behind the process. 

If the work wasn’t tactile or physical it would never end. Really what ends the work is the surface of the drawing, the paper becomes so textured and impossible to work on anymore.

— Jake Fried

Working only with black ink and white-out, Fried uses a 9 x 12 inch surface area of Arches watercolor paper and implements a stop motion technique to present 24 frames per second by hand in the same tradition as a film camera. Thus 60 seconds of “Night Vision” presents a total of 1,440 unqiue frames. No frame is ever repeated twice. 

Fried’s practice alludes to the avant-garde concept “la caméra-stylo” whereby the director handles the camera like a pen, writing with light. “Night Vision” puts a twist on the cinematic tradition as Fried uses ink and white out like a camera, transforming minimal materials into a multi-dimensional and sensory experience. 

Still images from “Night Vision“

The sound design is crafted with the same methodical approach as the drawing, by implementing a series of layers. The initial tonality is laid down in editing software, flattened, exported and built upon until there’s no space left. Fried explains that “once a piece is done it’s almost like I can hear it in my head and I just have to realize it in real life. The way I compose sound design is like the way I draw as well – layering a lot of information on top of itself.” 

The guiding tonality of the animation is in the dominant key of C Minor with accents of the breath, the heartbeat and ink scratching the surface of the paper. The result is both visceral and hypnotic and the sound design mirrors the gestures of the drawings even before our eyes can absorb all of the information as it unfolds. 

Still images from “Night Vision“

Originally created in 2015 and featured as a Staff Pick on Vimeo, “Night Vision” has a renewed life in the NFT metaverse. The visual portal through which the viewer travels feels right at home on the blockchain. While the work exists digitally, its origins are physical. Fried suggests that the physicality of the work helps dictate its beginning and end.

“If the work wasn’t tactile or physical it would never end,” he says. “Really what ends the work is the surface of the drawing, the paper becomes so textured and impossible to work on anymore. So if you watch the piece, it starts out with a really clean piece of blank paper and by the end, it’s this mountain range of black ink and crusty surface and it just sort of runs away and I have to end it.” 

A self-portrait ten months in the making, “Night Vision” is a meditation of hundreds of hours of nose to paper. It’s final physical state is an artifact while its digital manifestation is a palimpsest that actively explores the layers of creation.

See “Night Vision” on SuperRare

1

A. Moret

A. Moret is an international arts contributor and curator.   Her curiosity about the intersection of art and technology inspired the founding of Installation Magazine nearly a decade ago.  As the Artistic Director and Editor-in-Chief she oversees all editorial, conducts interviews with artists around the world and develops enriching partnerships that make art a source of conversation and not intimidation. She is based in Los  Angeles, CA.

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