1. Max Drekker (https://twitter.com/MaxDrekker)

   There are a lot of people doing geometric abstraction - let’s get that admission out of the way first. Standing out in an aesthetic where a few shape tools puts you on level with thousands of other artists means that you’ve got to have a concept or a style that is so indisputably your own that it requires some kind of refinement to even have a glimmer of hope for success.

   Max Drekker is an artist I discovered on Instagram who now has a large collection on objkt.com In my estimation, Drekker’s best work draws on the intersection between Op Art and Swiss Modern design - recalling book or album covers that I liked a lot when doing Lazlo Lissitsky programming. One thing you’ll discover if you try to do this very simple geometric style planning is that the apparently simple Op Art flavored designs are hard to make without careful attention to detail and a human hand doing the arrangements. Drekker plays with gradients and depth in a way similar to Miguel who I talked about in the previous volume - but Drekker’s use of depth and gradients is somehow more literal while at the same time being strictly abstract. That is - the shapes are meant to be perceived as having volumetric space, but in the same sense that an M.C. Escher object really only has the appearance of volumetric space.

Consider also the palettes that Max Drekker chooses: these are usually mixed palletes (not warm or cold) often in tertiary hues. In my own Lazlo project - I generally assigned pieces fictional dates closer to the turn of the century if they used lots of primary colors, and if they used more tertiary palettes like the one below they felt more like mid-century designs. This isn’t based on any kind of quantitative study, but more of an intuition based on looking at book cover after book cover and noticing trends: Max Drekker’s work often looks like it belongs to mid-century designs using late 60’s-80’s Op Art techniques. Sometimes Max goes back to more primary tones - but always the important part is that the colors seem carefully chosen each time, not just slapped in with the hope they’ll combine well.

Bear in mind here that you’re looking at an artist working in a strictly digital format creating pieces that don’t just feel like homage to a bygone era, but like Bilnd - these are as good or better than the authentic pieces of the design trend.

I would suggest you compare Max to a designer like Germano Facetti or Walter Ballmer. In a word, this is what sets Max Drekker apart from the thousands of geometric abstraction artists he is contemporary with: his work makes sense in a design context with historical awareness, with an intuition of the sensibilities now being praised by antiquarian appreciators of graphic design. Max also departs from being limited by flat shapes and adds all kinds of wild volume to some of his designs that feel more like polished objects in design studio imagination. I think his work will age exceptionally well and still feel like classic designs several decades from now.

2. Víctor Arce (https://twitter.com/lxtxcx)

Arce has a list of accomplishments and exhibits and clients - much more of a career artist evidently than most of the people I enthuse about. It shows, though - the sheer output and quality of his work should impress. I didn’t find anywhere a statement, so I’ll be doing reverse-engineering of what it seems to be about. Dominant colors throughout his work are pink, blue, yellow. One of the major themes is late 90’s early 00’s interfaces, which makes the use of the cardinal CMYK-suggestive (read: print) palettes ironic and playful. See, for example, his generative series called Ultrazone:

As we moved past web 1.0 (websites you navigated to directly) and into web 2.0 (social media as the dominant conduit) - looking back at the way it worked before can be kind of romantic. Websites used animated gifs just because they could - the tables and forms and structure of HTML felt so serious by contrast, so you had this odd combination of a new medium of communication trying to be taken seriously combined with the absolute ridiculousness of what people chose to do with it. It also had a certain magical quality: even though technically it works the same today, the way we use the internet has become so centralized that an empty address bar and the idea that you could just guess a hyperlink and then find circles and networks of linked pages the way old angelfire or geocities or whatever were connected is strange. Tumblr still works a little that way, but on the whole, the internet felt a bit more Alice in Wonderland back then. Like HAM radio lunatics sharing frequencies.

Just like Drekker and Bilnd, one of the most fascinating trends I find in art these days is looking back with hyper-idealized vision at those times - making something larger than life out of the relatively ordinary follies and flourishes of the actual digital artifacts.

You can see that effect going on in lxtxcx’s work - even his website is a smattering of goofy antique icons that you can move around and some actually do things. His HTML_Dream series (and others like it) are something like a candy-coated vaporwave still life in 30 frames. Tableaus of expressive user non-interfaces painted over in whimsical gradients. It’s a feeling of a GUI without the fact of it, the goofy little details taking center stage instead of the functionality.

What really drives lxtxcx designs is - as usual - composition. These aren’t the “anything simpler would be missing something” style of Polyforms, though, Arce goes back and forth in different works between maximalism and simplicity. Maximalism being as much as you can add before it just turns into noise, and the simplistic designs feeling like undeveloped software demos just to prove the thing exists in a misty low-poly proof-of-concept. What does it all mean? I think maybe it’s claiming the freedom to be playful and funny and not mean anything in particular - but point to the magic realism of web 1.0 interfaces and labyrinths and recall how it felt rather than how it was. In reality, it was a lot of mostly empty web pages with an image stolen from some other page, a few rambling blog posts that trailed off into months of silence, networks of bored people trying desperately to use this new medium to substitute for human interactions that take effort. It wasn’t actually a magical time, even though there were sparks of inspiration here and there - but with Victor Arce we can imagine it was rich and iconic and a renaissance of the virtual new-wave forum.

3. Pretty Bad aka Dylan Murphy (https://twitter.com/prettybadcrypto)

Obviously you can’t use the same criteria to evaluate an artist like Pretty Bad that you would use for Drekker - but that’s fine. I’d pick two different styles that Pretty Bad does to be my favorites: “portals” semi-abstract and his more general skeleton-themed tattoo looking art.

There was a distinct moment in the late 00’s where it seemed like skulls were in every design for everything. I have a personal theory that popular art and design trends since the 1960s have vacillated between sincere go-for-the-gusto you-like-what-you-like moments and then postured ironic stances towards that same material. Eventually people get tired of feeling distanced and savvy and just pick something to like, in turn that eventually gets played out and seen everywhere to the point that it’s boring. It’s a cycle that seems unavoidable. People picked skulls circa 2008 because skulls are badass. The inevitable backlash means that people picked skulls circa 2018 because skulls are passe, and liking things with earnestness is out of vogue.

Dylan Murphy’s art, to me, is the semi-ironic kind: it’s not hyperdetailed mean-as-hell skulls that would work for a Metallica bootleg, it’s simplistic skulls, funny self-deprecating names, bright colors.

This is what makes Pretty Bad in fact pretty good - it’s the darkness and edginess flipped inside out to be fun. The hand-drawn-looking style works well to create a sort of faux amateurish charm throughout his work. We can ask the same question we ask every time though - of the crowd of people doing similar things, why Pretty Bad? My answer is partially that Pretty Bad likes to experiment with tons of different styles and tools, and so when he comes at something with this classic style he usually creates something fresh and good. That is, because he’s not churning out thing after thing in the same vibe, we get new eyes on the style from the artist himself when he comes back to it. Another reason I might pick Pretty Bad over others is that his style appears so simple, and yet he can render totally different things in the same style and have it feel consistent. He hasn’t just created a subject matter or a few good renditions of them - he put together a pretty simple style that feels expansive because he can do new things with it when he feels like it and it doesn’t feel like a tangent. Consider: no skulls in sight - but this candle in the hand clearly feels from the same world.

So once you can sort of take in the style and start to feel at home - notice there’s a whole different collection that uses a different aesthetic but the same stylistic tendencies (for some of them). Pretty Bad also has a series called Portals that is less a strict style or content type collection than it is a general theme for making art. Portals from this place to that, literal portals that are follies or archways or doors, figurative portals that are mostly just shapes, sometimes in a new style of glitches or hard edge or vector, sometimes classic tattoo-style renderings. Once again - a part of the fun is variation on a theme. This also makes it fun for the collector - you can pick a series of portals that pair well together and create your own little triptych or series:

Pretty Bad even brings it back around sometimes - and this is one of my personal favorites out of all his work, this crossover between the whimsical tattoo skeleton stuff and a portal. That’s what makes this powerful: the style can encompass everything, and when he flourishes true to form it’s genuine bubblegum semi-ironic art that feels great. A world with themes that isn’t restricted to them, a style that’s expansive without feeling diluted, and simple compositions in several flavors that feel just enough like real cheap tattoos that they have the simple roughness that makes them so damn cool.