Poseidon DAO talks with Bonapace e La Fauci

Last Monday, Poseidon DAO spoke with Vittorio Bonapace and Fabio la Fauci, two artists very different from each other but with backgrounds that turned out to be more similar than expected. Besides telling each other about themselves, the two artists discussed their relationship with the NFT world.

Vittorio Bonapace

Vittorio, after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, first worked as a set designer at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome and then moved to London to pursue a career as an art director. 

In recent years, he then approached digital art and finally NFTs. His style is inspired by Renaissance heritage art and the classics to which he combines contemporary elements: in fact, his goal is to create a space where old and new can coexist harmoniously. 

The message that emerges from the artist’s works stems precisely from the combination of classical poses and shots populated by post-modern characters: the emphasis is on the negative aspects related to technology, such as the abuse in the use of social media, and the dystopian landscape in which the characters are placed makes the image even more striking. 

Yet hope in his works lingers, the human beings who make them up are a glimpse of an improvable and possible future. 

Bonapace’s creative process – which takes about a month on average – begins on paper, where he creates his first sketches and compositions after which he relies on various software to create his works. Even the music in his NFTs is self-produced; indeed, the artist, who loves to play music in his spare time, records both analog and digital sounds and then couples them to the video.

Vittorio Bonapace then spoke about his future projects, which include exhibitions in Beijing, Rome and Paris and a new gallery in the 3D metaverse.

Fabio la Fauci

Fabio la Fauci, before becoming a full-time artist, worked in London as an art director in an advertising campaign and then, in 2018, put his experiences together and started painting. His art is the result of continuous experimentation and research and is articulated in a mix of material painting and figurative art. 

The research is geared toward the study of materials and their applications in painting and focuses mainly on being able to mix ancient techniques and materials such as oil paints with more modern materials such as acrylic and gold leaf. Born as a physical artist, the production of NFTs follows a “traditional” process of creation: the work is first born physical and only then is it translated into digital and post-produced. 

What enchants the viewer in his works is the face, the highest expression of the different languages the artist uses, which induces the viewer to search within himself for the explanation of the work itself, generating different impressions in each one.

The artist’s upcoming projects include the Solo drop on Nifty Gateway to be held on 8 December and two exhibitions of physical art, one in London and one in Istanbul. 

Topic

The two artists discussed their relationship with the NFT sector. Vittorio Bonapace sees NFTs as the tool with which he finally got feedback in terms of value on his art, which is still an art that is born digital whereas Fabio La Fauci does not consider himself an NFT artist at all but rather “a painter who occasionally makes NFTs, translating his paintings onto blockchain.”

The discussion then shifted to the topic of digital art exhibitions, which was interesting because of the different views of the two artists: for Bonapace, it is essential to have huge ledwalls in order to fully enjoy every minute detail of the work while for La Fauci, ledwalls make the exhibition lose authenticity, as they are more typical of festivals than art exhibitions. 

According to Fabio, the biggest criticality of NFT art exhibitions is the screens, which are often all the same and therefore do not allow for a hierarchy of works and many often force images into formats differing from their native ones.