With an eye towards traditional art history and a hand at the cutting edge of the NFT space, Matt Kane’s Meules after Claude Monet exemplifies the experimental innovation characterizing this new medium, alongside Kane’s interest and respect for art history proper. Kane’s animated master copy of one of Claude Monet’s most recognizable masterworks playfully renegotiates interpretations of color and form. The meditative, well-loved colors of Monet are animated for the digital age. For all Walter Benjamin’s optimism in the severing of the quasi-mystical aura from the original in the wake of digital reproduction, Meules after Claude Monet, as art critic David Joselit writes in After Art, replaces instead of “aura, there is buzz”.
Kane simultaneously allows the viewer to reflect on the warmth of this sunset landscape and the digital matrix of layers and vector shapes that comprise his custom software. Rippling through a seemingly infinite array of colors and lines, Kane’s work engages with the traditions of art history, examining old masters to integrate and articulate the profoundly infinite possibilities of the software medium. Meules after Claude Monet illustrates the NFT artist’s negotiation of his innovative new medium within the broader art historical context.
Meules after Claude Monet by Matt Kane - Gigapixel Image
a gigapixel image is composed of one billion pixels
Aligning the revolutionary impressionists with the contemporary wave of crypto artists, this work was the first that Kane produced after having first minted an NFT. In the same week, Claude Monet’s Meules (1890) shattered the record for the highest sum ever paid for a work by Monet and for any Impressionist work of art. As Kane describes, “I remember daring to dream while creating this work that perhaps one day I’d see this work shown at Sotheby’s and be able to create a line through history joining the Impressionists, a revolutionary group of artists that rejected practices of the past,with the contemporary Crypto Artists who are also rejecting practices of the past.”
Kane’s journey through art to NFTs stands as an intriguing template for the current wave of digital craftsmen. Exhibiting paintings in Chicago 2004, Kane ended up settling in Seattle and focusing on web development. It was there that he honed his digital skills while making ends meet in his daytime work. One forgets the level of technical craft that stands behind the NFT space, and the training required to interact both digitally and on the blockchain. It was only with the growth of the NFT space that Kane found the collectors and ability to reignite and refocus on his core passions: art and its creative expression through coding. This work will be accompanied by a layered installation of the work in CryptoVoxels, a virtual reality installation through one of the metaverses that allow the viewer to walk in and view the layers. Therefore, the viewer can navigate within and become one with the layers of installation that comprise the present work, understanding the complexities and of its creation from within. A radical exemplar of the revolutionary medium of NFTs, Kane’s Meules after Claude Monet explores the foundations of artistic production itself through an exceptionally dazzling and enthralling scene.
