There is an anecdote told by Goethe when he was just a child. One of the visitors in his family home, a military guy with an obsession about art, proposed to several artists with different skills to create the perfect painting. One of the artists was notable in landscapes, other one in human figures, other in animals. The visitor figured out that putting together different creators with unique skills would create a notable piece of art. But at the end, the artists fight each other for more room in the canvas, and the painting was just an accumulation of mistakes. There was a clear intention by Goethe, a marvelous German writer and erudite, to show us that art is not a simple declarative performance with skills. It requires something else. And that else I found it in these three notable paintings created by the young artists Gitnick and Stoll.
One of the most interesting things happening in the new NFT scenario is that every concept we saw in the past is now put in evaluation. Technology is of course a real factor in this new process. One of concepts being shacked in this era is referred to the single authorship in art. We are watching several co-creation projects in Cardano which configure a new set of possibilities where each style provided by two artists is turned into a very unique piece. One of the most representative is the collection End Violence created by Charles Gitnick in collaboration with different artists. A NFT classic on Cardano for several ones who are following the series. Raising Hell was a surprise in the middle of it, a great surprise to me, a trilogy I want to talk about because it just has been delivered.
Taken all together, you can distinguish the most evident difference among them. The colors. They establish a transition of time, space and meaning, like a journey where art and nature are undoubtedly the most important protagonists. What I realized watching these pieces is a marvelous thought related to the artist meeting its real path in the world: creating art.
You can take the first of them, Raising Hell in Paradise. In this bucolic, heavenly piece, what we watch is the appearance of art on the path of life. The painted wall by Gitnick is placed in the end of the river, which has been associated multiple times in literature with the life itself. It’s the proclamation that life is just art now, with all its meanings on back, and can’t be avoided. The dawning has arrived. An artist has been recognize as it or, at least, knowing that your future is going to be exclusively to its service. I like the meta-meanings around it as well: the nature seeing itself through the painted wall as a mirror, the quote Raising Hell in Paradise an internal, powerful sentence where art is all about, and the green and beautiful day as the best way to exercise your mission in Earth.
The second piece of the trilogy, Smoking Till my Braid Fried, is about the creator and the travel of the artist. It is not a surprise to me that is the only piece where you can see a human in the trilogy, while at the same time you can watch this unique stamp by Stoll of his last works: a human head, floating in the river whose waters are filled with mental creations, and the cigar tilted and being consumed as a sample of the ongoing artistic process. Again, the mirror game between painted wall and the painting itself is a suggestive way to reflect the variations between reality and dreams. While the first painting showed us that a new path has been realized, giving birth to an artist with a mission, the second one is the process itself, and the long journey which has been used for it.
And then we got to the final third NFT, Life is Still Beautiful. A powerful message that, after all, art is always the winner in our travel in this world. It stays up in the most hot and dangerous environments, reflecting all our internal and invisible passions. That is the way you can interpret the quotes in the Gitnick painting, like the statements of an artist who says to us he was here and got victorious in his journey. Because the journey was just being in art. Again, mirror game proposed by Stoll and Gitnick works to create this potent piece. It is the manifest that art is a fireproof creation. An immortal piece that exceeds human nature.
The artist has been gone, but art remains.
