UNDRGRND DIGS 019
APRIL 4TH, 2022
5 Artists From the UNDRGRND Collection
UNDRGRND DIGS is a periodical feature showcasing artists that the UNDRGRND curators dig. We sift through the social media and NFT platforms to find the best artists waiting to be discovered. UNDRGRND believes in the artists we feature and we will purchase NFTs from each artist featured. Purchases will be airdropped to reward UNDRGRND community members.
The name Metadreams comes from the artist's wish to use the meta world as a bridge to support his family. Previously working as a commission artist, Metadreams is quite familiar with various styles. However, he chooses surrealist cartoons as his signature. Using modern-digital techniques, the artist always presents satirical works that aim to criticize or give opinions on social phenomena. He combines those techniques with animation to emphasize the meaning and make it easier to understand. The dominance of pop colors is often combined with cool colors to strengthen the satirical messages.
Although it began as a cultural movement, surrealism has become an umbrella term referring to any imaginative, weird, or semi-real visualization. It presents a contradiction between dreams and realities. The objective of surrealism is to represent a metaphysical world of dreams where anything is possible, and any event can have multiple interpretations. As odd as it may sound, the best surrealistic images are the simple ones for me. That is why I take delight in the artworks of BebeWahyu, an Indonesian artist who started his career as a street artist and mural painter and now focuses on surrealist illustration art.
Most of his works feature a “clean” background without crowded details, so as a viewer, I can focus on the point of the illustration. And usually, he chooses no more than three main objects that are entirely different and disconnected. However, he manages to find ways to combine these objects strangely and interestingly so that even though his works seem “simple,” they still have the surreal element. The presence of animal objects in each illustration has also become one of his signatures.
Let’s learn about various mythologies and histories through the works of Tuhankoma. Through his black-and-white digital illustrations, he reinterprets various mythological characters and historical events, ranging from the mythology of the Batak tribe, which is his cultural roots, to stories from the Abrahamic religions. If we dig deeper, there is always a profound meaning in each of his works.
He visualizes his works in a surreal-comic style with monochromatic colors. His halftone technique creates a striking array of textures that add exciting twists to his illustrations. At the same time, the contrasting gradient gives dramatic, magical, and sometimes colossal impressions. One example is in his work “Naga Padoha,” a creature from Batak mythology illustrated in the form of a gigantic centipede.
Through NFT Art, this fine arts scholar hopes to be more creative and produce illustrations that are rather different from his mainstream field of work.
Covid-19 hit everyone hard, including Vince Helen, the portrait artist from West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Amid the psychological and financial blows caused by the pandemic, Vince remained determined to find a solution and learned about NFT Art in mid-2021. In early January 2022, he did his first minting, and to Vince's amazement, he received great feedback.
But actually, that comes as no surprise, considering his beautiful works are full of feminine and melancholic expressions. Vince manages to capture very similar features from his reference photos in many of his works. His sketchy pencil lines always emphasize details in specific parts and compositions. To add depth to his sketches, he uses a hatching method without any blending, and that technique has become one of his trademarks.
The themes of his works revolve around idealism, psychology, and emotion, embedded with certain messages or stories. Monochrome nuances have dominated Vince's works since working on realistic portrait art in 2010. However, he intends to explore the use of watercolor for his future sketches.
Gilang Nanda's interest in the art world began when he worked as a content creator for an Instagram account. While working there, he learned to edit images with several simple applications. Then he also thought about how to create artworks even though he was not good at drawing manual illustrations. Finally, he discovered digital collage art and has focused on that field ever since.
A digital collage is a form of graphic art created by mixing different images, textures and concepts to form an entirely new composition. Gilang chooses to combine various vintage comics from the 1950s-1980s and turn them into an interesting retro-style story illustration. Some examples of comics that become references for his works are Air Force and Battle Squadron. His works generally carry themes around war, horror events, and chaos.
Through collage art, Gilang can represent the world from a different perspective. The artist's observations of the world around him are composed into images accessible to any viewer.