Every artist dreams of entering the NFT Space with a bang. Alexandre Farto or Vhils made this happen literally through his Street Art NFT. The Portuguese graffiti and visual artist blasted a portrait into a building using explosives. The 2-sec video and a digital rendering of the fragments from the explosion are being auctioned off as NFTs.
Vhil’s Creative Process
Vhils is known for his unusual approach to street art. He uses the bas-relief carving technique to create his street art carvings. This means that instead of adding paint or wheatpaste posters to surfaces, Vhils opts to subtract from the building themselves. He uses tools like scalpels and chisels to drills, jackhammers, and even explosives to tear away at crumbling walls, revealing the street art.
Vhils’ most popular form of media is his relief art. These portraits are chiseled into plaster and brick walls all over the world. He uses realistically etched faces of locals and often marginalized people as the subject. His work reimagines the role of graffiti as a method of reckoning with our past and celebrating our shared history.
Street Art NFT
His Street Art NFTs are based on his latest work called “The End of the Industrial Era.” The project is an ode to his childhood because it explores the dilapidated buildings of Barreiro, a massive rust-belt area in Portugal where he was born and raised. Once again, Vhils used explosives to reveal the portrait of the subject instantaneously. This time, it is an archived photo of a local factory worker. The subject flashed in a split second, quickly followed by the demolition of the entire structure it appeared on.
The whole relief art execution took place within about two seconds. A ballistic camera that films at 2,000 frames per second captured the moment from multiple angles. The street art NFTs are based on this video of the explosion and implosion. It will include one open edition and three limited editions.
Aside from the street video, Vhils is also minting NFTs featuring stone fragments. The debris from the explosion was collected, laser and hand-carved with several images. According to Vhils, these images represent us all in small fragments as fossils of our life today. A physical piece of the debris will also be given to the NFT holders.
NFTs are versatile and fluid
Vhils is an avid experimentalist. NFTs fit in perfectly with his work despite it being a novelty. This demonstrates how NFTs are fluid and can support a wide array, if not all, forms of media. NFTs are essential to brands because they can represent digital files such as art, audio and video. NFTs are so versatile so they can represent other forms of creative work like virtual real estate, virtual worlds, fashion and even financial products.
Sotheby’s is handling the auction. Interested buyers can visit Nifty Gateway on Wednesday, June 23.
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