Stories of the Blue Desert. The magical universe of Laprisamata

By Ivan Quaroni

Among the languages and currents that characterize the NFT art scene, one of the most recurring labels is that of "Pop Surrealism," an admittedly varied style that encompasses numerous influences, from cartoons to illustrations, from B-grade science fiction to Graffiti, from tattoos to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s. The Pop Surrealism movement (also called Lowbrow Art) emerged in the United States between the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s, after a long gestation of linguistic hybridizations, stylistic crossovers, and contaminations that took place in the crucible of California's West Coast from after World War II to the present. The explosion of the movement, christened by the painter Robert Williams, was fostered by the contribution of specialty magazines such as Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose, which brought to the fore a galaxy of artists from different creative fields, such as graphic design, illustration, and comics and who were landing for the first time in the dimension of art tout court with a renewed spirit, imbued with pop culture and great temptations. In short, a revolution in many ways similar to the one that forty years later would lead to the birth of Crypto Art.

Unlike other styles, Pop Surrealism is not identifiable with a unified and defined grammar; however, it encompasses a plethora of aesthetic categories and linguistic nuances that are also very different from each other. 

To say that Luis Toledo's, aka Laprisamata, is Pop Surrealist art is to make an unquestionable but, at the same time, overly general statement. To know this Spanish artist, winner of numerous awards (including the Wacom Award, the Pantone Award, and the Behance National Design Awards) and understand how his unique style was born and developed, it is necessary to cast a glance at his biography. 

Indeed, the works of past great masters, such as Hieronymus Bosch, Diego Velasquez, and Francisco Goya, first seen in the halls of the Prado Museum in Madrid, as well as the paintings, sculptures, and sacred architecture of Baroque art contributed to his formation. All of which, during his youth, merged with his passion for music and underground culture. Not surprisingly, as a young man, he gained experience designing concert posters and record covers for the alternative music scene, then working as an art director for several record labels, eventually founding his own design studio, PrisaMata, in Madrid. At the same time, Luis Toledo begins to build a personal language based on the mixture of analog and digital processes. He mainly uses the collage technique, cutting out curious and interesting images from newspapers, magazines, and books, which he then reworks using Photoshop and other software. This fusion of cut-up and digital drawing gives rise to works rich in mythological suggestions, in which memories surface of the artist's travels to the Mediterranean - to discover classical Greco-Roman art and the origins of Iberian culture - and to Latin America and the Orient - where he was fascinated by sacred iconographies and folklore. 

The result of these multiple layered influences is the emergence of a hyper-chromatic style, characterized by the presence of figures built with textures and geometric patterns that recall both the tesserae of Roman and Byzantine mosaics and the illuminated pages of the Books of Hours, as well as the ornamentation of Hindu temples and the circular shapes of Tibetan mandalas. A cornucopia of hybrid, mutant, constantly proliferating forms that describe characters and places of a fantastic dimension, meticulously designed by the artist in every detail through the creation of fascinating mythology. 

The world described in Laprisamata's turgid iconographies is called The Blue Desert, or also The Desert of the Blue Men, a place, as the artist explains, "where the Iberians will live, an ancient sea where priests perform rituals and sacrifices, and where the three-eyed skull and black felines are worshipped." This imaginative land - *"*where elms used to grow and where some olive trees, acacias, almond trees, and thyme now survive" - is populated by feuding tribes, sacred animals, and vestals who invoke mythical and primordial beings such as the Titans, employed in fighting and the construction of towers and fortified walls. Alongside the Titans, also called Sanint, and the Yellow Priestesses, chimeras with enigmatic names such as Larein Timas, Dracon Driene, and Triene Vulpes appear in this magic-dominated desert universe, looking like the modern, digital, but mostly psychedelic variant of specimens from a Gothic Bestiary.

Saint in the Blue Desert
Saint in the Blue Desert

The work created by Laprisamata for the Poseidon DAO Deploy Collection is titled Saint in the Blue Desert and belongs to the Rituals series, which, together with the Sacred Animals and Titans series, is part of a long-term project, which includes the future creation of an exhibition, the construction of a Virtual Reality universe, and the production of graphic novels and animated shorts dedicated to the world of the Blue Man Desert.

The work depicts the colossal portrait of one of the Titans, a face, at once hypnotic and hieratic, resembling arcane cartography, studded with spiritual symbols that, like dimensional portals, open wide on the vision of further worlds. Worlds that are metaphors for the human condition, haunted by time, ravaged by violence, captive to the eternal struggle between life and death.

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