It always starts as an interview, a silent interrogation of sorts. Who are you? I ask as I sit across the screen from the images and begin to scroll, click, zoom. What are you trying to say? What’s important to you? Where are your obsessions, your preoccupations? In any NFT art collection, I look for the unexpected, the unpredictable, for elements and images that recur, the hidden-in-plain-sight markers of any particular reference, philosophy, argument. Creative work requires immense courage because artists can’t help but leave their fingerprints on the things they make; they always risk being seen by those who choose to look.

Creative work requires immense courage because artists can’t help but leave their fingerprints on the things they make; they always risk being seen by those who choose to look.

I’ve spent hours interrogating Max Taquet’s “Sceneries and artworks” collection, and I can’t shake the feeling that nearly every hazy, lonely landscape in this collection is a representation of the creative process—what it feels like to push past the boundary lines and border-guards of our own consciousness, and the new and seemingly infinite worlds waiting for us once we summon that courage.

In terms of references, Taquet’s art is gorgeously reminiscent of the aesthetic of the golden age of science-fiction: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (1951), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1950s through 1980s), as well as mid-century editions of H.G. Wells classics like The First Men in the Moon (1900). Taquet’s work is never less than modern, yet each piece feels infused with all the space-age optimism and anxiety of the mid-twentieth century.

Each of the “Sceneries and artworks” displays a hazy, timeless quality, as if these worlds are suspended in time as well as space; their sensibility is simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic. The color palette varies widely across the collection, but the composition is always calm, confident, uncluttered. Though Taquet’s land-and-sky scapes are cosmic, otherworldly, they retain the documentary quality of photographic work, giving us images that appear hyperreal rather than surreal. Specific elements frequently recur: haze, cloud and fog, photorealistic light flares, diverse spherical bodies, eclipses, orbits, horizontal and vertical lines that subtly split the frame into quadrants.

Though Taquet’s land-and-sky scapes are cosmic, otherworldly, they retain the documentary quality of photographic work, giving us images that appear hyperreal rather than surreal.

Each piece offers its viewer an escape; whether that window shows a past or future world depends entirely on the eye of the beholder. And each work in the collection rewards its audience for pausing to look closer.

The inky outline of a solitary traveler in the lower left foreground of “Space Inn” recontextualizes the entire scene; loneliness washes over you, and suddenly you can’t help but wonder if the eponymous inn is a space-mirage, if the wanderer will ever find the place she seeks. In “Forest Exploration” the lone sign of life is the coal-black contour of a bird against an uneasy sky, a gradient of washed-out taupe and turquoise behind the twin cooling towers of a nuclear power station. Study “Canyon” carefully and you’ll find a dark figure standing at the halfway point of the bridge; look closer and the tiny orb of light against the right cliff face becomes a lonely spacecraft hovering between the canyon walls.

“Quiet Evening” is the collection’s single cityscape, dense with urban detail; two mega-cities mirror each other, two suns are suspended at either edge of the skyline. But the true brilliance of this image is the way in which it offers a full quadrant of possible perspectives; each ninety-degree rotation reveals yet another distinct and fully-realized metropolis.

“Eclipse” gives us the most coherent narrative, with tension, stakes and inciting incident all visible inside the frame.  The scene—a pair of corroded, densely inhabited industrial towers overshadowed by a massive blacked-out sun—is an immediate jolt to the imagination; the story of this planet began to construct itself in my mind the moment I saw it. Artistically, “Eclipse” is a masterwork of texture: from the fog of cloud that hangs in the atmosphere and the weathered, crumbling stonework at the towers’ base, to the tawny, grainy, perfectly-shaded sand dunes and the dusty wind blowing over the planet’s barren surface.

Textured, hazy, tinted in shades of aubergine and ochre, “Opaque” allows us to glimpse, ever so briefly, the hand of the creator at work. The piece centers on Taquet’s simple yet eerie artistic choice to pluck all the stars from the night sky, to erase every pinprick of light, as if they never existed in this world at all.

Taquet’s “Sceneries and artworks” collection uses images of solitude, exploration and the vastness of space to reflect the inward journey of the artist—to show us the frontiers of the imagination, the soul.

Creative work is always a kind of exploration, pushing against the limits of time and space and possibility, yet there is also a fundamental loneliness to the work of making art—a loneliness that Taquet’s work captures so beautifully. Once, we called space “the final frontier.” The “Sceneries and artworks” collection uses images of solitude, exploration and the vastness of space to reflect the inward journey of the artist—to show us the frontiers of the imagination, the soul. Because, as Mozambican writer Mia Couto explains: “The journey does not begin when distances are traveled, it begins when our internal borders are crossed.”

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Sources:

All images from the “Sceneries and artworks” OpenSea collection used with permission from the artist.

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