T his January, Sotheby’s New York is delighted to present Des Lucréce work. This series, titled 'DesMonsters,' focuses on the many types of personality the artist has encountered during his artistic journey.
The Monsters collection will consist of 100 unique 1 of 1 hand-drawn 3 frame NFT. At the occasion of this auction you’ll be able to discover 5 of theses new characters: The Timekeeper, The Endmaker, The Mitter, The Riddler, The Proctor.
In addition to these lots, Des Lucréce will present 2 exclusive 1/1 “Emptyness” and “Return,” a contemporary take on traditional Asian painting and Zen Buddhism principle in the context of the journey of the artist into the NFT space.
The online auction will open for bidding on Sothebys.com at 12 pm EST on January 5th through January 12th.
Young emerging Norwegian-born Vietnamese artist living and working in the US, Des Lucréce is using a combination of procreate, photoshop, and after effects to produce his 3 frame Gif animation reminding us of a flip book full of sketches featuring his signature intertwining lines, which remind us of the various inspiration he taps into like other artists like Basquiat, Keith Haring, Maki Haku, Futura 2000, and Saul Bass as well as reference from his personal life .
Being a brand agency designer for most of his professional career, Des Lucréce has a strong sense of style and an excellent grasp of the concept of branding, his being defined by the bold use of color and expression!
Having lived and worked in various countries his body of work demonstrates a truly multicultural approach in both style and reference. His studio work delves into his experience of having what he calls "No Home Center."
“A common but not discussed issue as a 2nd generation Asian immigrant is that we are too Asian for Westerners and too western for Asia. This, coupled with being called a foreigner in the places I've lived, has created a rift between me and the places I've called home. In essence, "No Home Center" is a disconnect between our sense of belonging and identity.”
Des Lucréce often likes to make mention of the concept of “objet petit a” developed by psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan more specifically the piece “coke as as objet petit a” by Slavoj Zizek.
Dipping into the concept of the link between the concepts of desire, pleasure and ownership trying to answer the everlasting question of art as an object of desire by challenging what we are willing to sacrifice to acquire it and the satisfaction we gain from owning it.
The artist originally native to the Tezos ecosystem has gained an exponential popularity in just the span of a few years, due to his mastery of the code of the ecosystem leveraging innovatively notion of game theory and tokenomics to put his collector in constant philosophical dilemma. He then branched out to other chains and started minting with great success on the ethereum blockchain. Among his collectors we can find figures of the space well known for their taste such as Cozomo de Medici, Kevin Rose, Mike Shinoda and Mooncat2878 to name only a few.
At only 27, Des Lucréce is surprisingly erudite, referencing psychological concepts developed by Roland Barthes and Kenya Hara throughout his production. He is an artist destined to a bright future in both NFTs and the traditional art world. Many have already knighted him the successor of XCOPY.
The artist has encountered many types of personalities throughout his life ranging from welcoming to — not as much. With the rise of covid, Asian xenophobia was at its all-time high.
“ My mother ran a nail salon throughout the pandemic in a small southern town. It doesn't take a creative imagination to imagine what could've been said about her and her business during this time. The Monsters project was born out of creating portraits of the types of personalities I saw spreading hate online about either the business or Asian people as a whole. The project has since grown to include other characters I've encountered while being viewed as the other.”
The Monsters collection will consist of 100 unique 1 of 1 hand-drawn 3 frame Monsters. At the occasion of this auction you’ll be able to discover 5 of theses new characters: The Timekeeper, The Endmaker, The Mitter, The Riddler, The Proctor
This series has the particularity of providing an interactive and evolutive collection the collector can fully be part of !
The collector of Des Lucréce’s work also gets to be part of the artistic process using the systems of evolution the collection offers through the use of The Fusion Chamber, enabling its holder to fuse 2 DesMonster NFT. The collector can request specific attributes from each monster to influence the outcome. The artist will, of course, use his artistic judgment to guide you to the best potential outcome.
Evolutions will work a bit differently. Random Evolution Stone drops will occur at the end of the series. These stones will have elemental properties that change the background and monster to fit the corresponding elemental property such as Fire, Electric, Psychic, Water, and Air.
Those innovative mechanisms offer an interesting long term perspective to this project and imbricate within the artistic universe of Des Lucréce smoothly while leveraging creative ideas about the artist to collector relationship.
This piece explores the aesthetic of antique asian art style and is a calling back to his childhood memory of his grandmother's lacquer collection. A surreal mountainscape emerging from a sea of darkness, only brightened up by the grazing light of the horizon, the reflection of those stylized oriental clouds and the falling cherry blossom leaf suspending time in a meditative state reminds us of the landscape of the south of Asia and how they have been transcripted throughout history by their native artist.
The universe of this piece is anxiety inducing, bathing in a dark blue color (a color historically associated with emptiness), the lone and solitary character similar to Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” is romantically contemplating the serene emptiness of darkness while above, way up in the night sky, the monumental ghost of his forgotten demon is paradoxically glancing back at his one self.
This piece is like contemplating the night sky, it's beautiful and filled with shining flickering light although beyond it there is an infinite and terrifying darkness, the vertigo of our insignificance compared to the immensity of the universe, questioning us on the meaning of our existence.
The piece radiates a sentiment of “let-go”, a strange sense of Zen, making us wonder if perhaps everything comes out of emptiness. Perhaps referencing here one of the ten Oxherding pictures, a fundamental production of Zen buddhism practice. This emptiness is not a vacuum but the possibility of endless transformations preceding enlightenment.
Most likely an allegory of the artist block, faced not with the challenge of a blank page but with the obstacle of a page darkened by everything that he has made through his life and everything that was made before him. So darkened, so narrowed down, so filled to the last bit that it ends up appearing completely empty to the point that the only way to shine through is perhaps embracing it. Des Lucréce via his style full of simplicity and subtility manages to bring meaning to vacuity like many Ukyo-e and Nanga Masters paintings such as Hokusai have done before him.
Des Lucréce pieces are often thought through as a Diptych, his blue pieces dialoguing with his red pieces in cryptic manners. The work here is almost a follow up to Emptyness, sharing similar aesthetics and exploring the same reference source material as the first piece: the Ten Oxherding Pictures of Zen Buddhism.
These pieces seen under this context can be viewed as an analogy of the artist's journey within the WEB3 spaces and particularly the bull market within which he built his success. A journey full of adventures, oxherding a bull market, from a search, an inspiration, a vision, to catching, tending and riding the NFT wave up until the tides calm and seemingly disappear.
Now that the bear cycle is well installed, the artist proposes here a piece that urges us to return to the original ideal of the blockchain if it isn't too late. The illustration of a moment where the craze for NFT has been put to a necessary halt in hype providing the artists populating the space a chance to reconnect with the roots of this ecosystem.
The present moment is significant for the NFT space as it is at the crossroads of proving its resilience. Artists that will manage to make it are the ones with an uncompromising vision, whose flow of ideas and creative power remains a constant flow unfazed by the world surrounding them.
It's about a balance to achieve, by being master of our fate while being open to the world. We have to be aware and reflect on how extraordinary and epic this journey was while acknowledging that this is just the beginning. Both pieces dramatize what it is to be a “true” artist, showing it to be the ordinary self doing ordinary things in the most extraordinary way.
