The digital art of Silent G is appearing in the first ever offline NFT art exhibit. This major turning point takes place in Beijing, where live crowds will be able to view NFT art in person.
This event merges the new digital frontier with more traditional approaches to showing fine art. And there is perhaps no artist better suited to lead this transition than Kian. His work takes on the difficult task of integrating the old with the new, the classic with the cutting edge. His work lives in the porous border between the two. But who is he? And what can his artwork tell us about the future of art?
Kian Ghavam Shirazi known as "Silent G" was born in Tehran, Iran on April 17, 1980. The son of a famous artist, Kian’s childhood was filled with experiences that fueled his appreciation, love, and understanding of art. He turned to graphic design at 13, eventually getting a bachelor’s degree in the field in 2002. Already as a teenager, he was merging the worlds of traditional fine art with new digital tools.
While Kian himself is silent on the subject of his work — preferring to give the art space to tell its own narratives — his creations speak fluently. And they tell the tale of a revolution in art going on right now.
Kian’s self-portrait is an example of his eclectic mix of artistic styles and blends of approaches. He imports painterly attributes to his creations, not only in the textures but in the ways he points to pre-digital fine art. In this work, the influence of Art Deco is clear. Early 20th-century figurative painting is allowed to live alongside a self-consciously computerized practice.
The background repeatedly morphs and reworks the subject, but always in a way that highlights the new possibilities through digital art. It’s a style that bridges our expectations created in the past with the new expectations we are creating for the future. And because it is a self-portrait, Kian is making himself the fulcrum of this change. Though it isn’t so stuffy or pretentious as all that, the element of play is alive and well in every detail of the piece.
In his NFT artwork Dave G, Kian again brings us the visual cues of two worlds. With Michelangelo’s David as his muse, Kian hems in and interrupts with elements that are both digital (the amplitude display that acts as a halo) and pop culture (the gangster’s revolver). Were it not for the introduction of the gun, we might easily forget that the master’s David statue is of a man about to murder — the artist has to bring in an image of violence from our time to re-spark that danger. To unite it all, Kian uses a texture that is both a reference to painting while also only attainable in a digital workspace.
Here we see art as it stands, all in a single unity. He brings together the long shadow of the past and its most noble endeavors with the mental space of the present. We see the mastery of tools of a different time embraced by a new set of tools. The fact that it is an NFT itself is part of the artwork’s entire idea. The NFT represents the final leap into the digital realm, and so Kian’s works are like visions from our collective future.
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