Remember The Sims, a video game that was popular in the 2010s? You constructed an alternative version of yourself and gave it exterior traits that had nothing at all do with your ones in real life. So you could flirt with non-existent crushes, impatiently perfect your skill as a painter in speeded-up time, use all your cheat codes to generate an endless flow of income, or have the time of your life building the most luxurious home in Neighborhood 1. Sometimes, you drowned your Sim in a stair-less swimming pool – out of boredom or just for the hell of it. Boundless possibilities, the opportunity to take unconventional decisions and manage what’s going on without having to follow commonly accepted standards: this is what we find attractive in simulators. The controllable and predictable world of the video game becomes a place of escapism where we can go to hide from the real world and its problems.
The current age with its latest advances in imitation of reality offers us more and more: we can heal our mental disorders using VR, build exhibition spaces in Spatial, organize fashion shows in Decentraland, or go on online dates in Parisland. But is the metaverse right now a space where we actually intend to live, or is it just another hole that it’s convenient for us to flee to? Whatever the answer, we‘ll need to put our digital dominion in order. We’ll probably do so, as we usually do, by copying-pasting images of favourite objects from the analogue world. For inspiration we can always turn to utopian interiors in works by DotPigeon – so long as we’re not put off by the constant presence of a guy in a balaclava…
DotPigeon says he began creating digital painting (read: drawing pictures in Photoshop) when he was 16. Like many enthusiasts at the time, he posted his works on Deviantart. But we’ll pass that particular corner of the worldwide web by and use Instagram – the social media with pictures that’s banned in Russia – to take a look at DotPigeon’s portfolio. His very first works – or at least those of them he has decided not to consign to the archives – exploit popular visual codes. A canary-coloured sneaker swoosh is an allusion to Trump’s hairstyle. A Barbie doll with an unfading smile demonstrates cellulite. Fatty bacon from a fast-food stall substitutes for energy fuel. DotPigeon selects everyday aspects from our life and then crosses them with one another in deceptively random order. It’s like asking ChatGPT to construct something more responsible and more internally logical than digital sculptures by Urs Fischer.
DotPigeon’s images pretend to be versions of advertising campaigns that will never be realized and whose strangeness and contradictions have been deliberately hyperbolized and made fun of. The orientation on creating an engaging interaction in these pictures betrays the fact that before creating art DotPigeon worked for more than 10 years as art director at an advertising agency. This explains his love of working with the kind of signs and messages we are trained to read automatically. Over this decade Stefano Fraone – DotPigeon’s real name (or rather the name he’s comfortable with) – got fed up with client briefs, incompetent employees, the constant efforts not to stray outside the limited budget, and other corporate delights. His art – creating his own on objects – gave him a new feeling of freedom.
Ironically, liberation from the burden of office life coincided with the imposition of global restrictions throughout the world. During the Covid pandemic, when most of us were cut off by our own four walls, DotPigeon decided to use being shut in as an imaginary spatial environment in which to shape the main character in his work. In his new digital paintings DotPigeon constructed luxurious interiors – but not out of Covid boredom or feverish asthenia. He studied contemporary design trends and trawled through web sites on architecture, blogs about interior decoration, and collectors’ feeds. Sites showcasing exclusive real estate – such as Zillow – turned out to be a non-obvious source of allusions: the large white letters of the Hollywood sign look very organic bursting into flames against the background of a convincingly imitated interior belonging to some celebrity or other.
The accessibility and openness of this information means that it’s possible to put together a villa literally by ticking off items on a list – in the sterile-glossy style of Pinterest, for instance, with slender bas reliefs and snow-white walls, arched windows, and fluid staircases. Or you could follow in the footsteps of Kim Kardashian’s totally nude residence and build yourself a minimalist palace with large empty spaces like those in a Protestant church. You would have to give the rooms with the loudest echo to a hanging of work by Lucio Fontana. These interiors may be regarded as still-lifes that have expanded to fill a room, a symbolic set of objects whose aggregation constitutes the portrait of a person living in this particular part of space-time. Or the portrait of a society that possesses its own collection of artefacts.
Just as Richard Hamilton’s collage ‘Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?’ is a collection of consumer cliché-objects, DotPigeon’s interiors are a concentration of contemporary ideas about status, privilege, and exclusivity. The art placed in these spaces is likewise exclusive. As self-proclaimed curator, DotPigeon selects and hangs on the walls of his virtual villas the hottest names to appear at auction (to find them, all you have to do is browse Hypebeast): Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomi Nara. Nor does he forget his popular fellow artists, including CB HOYO, Retna, KAWS, Stik, and Javier Calleja.
Hamilton used his parodic collage to criticize post-war consumer culture, in which absolutely anything could be an object of consumption. The space of his staged room is absolutely permeable – the differences between public and private have been rubbed out by media and consumer goods. The interiors in DotPigeon’s works, on the other hand, feel very boxy, enclosed, stagnant, almost vacuum-vacant. They are a model, a template, a lifeless façade. From time to time, the windows show glimpses of the ‘exterior’ setting and pieces of nature – but this too looks as if it has frozen still in its evergreen-ness.
The bright-blue pools with static water resemble paintings by David Hockney from the period when he was painting Californian houses with their rich colours and simultaneous superficiality. The shelves with books – so popular with influencers as décor – burst with spines in various colours. But take a closer look and, instead of books by historians of fashion or art critics, you’ll find that these home libraries are stuffed with covers bearing insulting inscriptions. Similar provocative phrases can be seen scratched on the upholstery of the sofa or tagged using aerosol cans on the walls. The longer you look, the more details you notice that dissolve the idyllic illusion. On the marble tables are fag ends. There is litter on the carpet. The chairs have knives plunged into them. These strange details are bugs, mistakes, noise. Among them the dominant glitch, the elephant in the room, is that figure in the balaclava.
The rebel in the balaclava (RIOT) is an annoying flaw, a piece of interference in the polished setting of the luxury mansions. Somehow he finds his way into these houses and sets about causing anarchy. He sets fire to the buildings, destroys them, initiates pogroms, or desperately turns the whole house upside down. Note that we are not shown precisely how he has broken his way in. There is no violent action, killing, robbery, or other criminal filth. You get the impression that the person calling himself a bandit is actually a permanent resident of these villas – just a fairly harmful one who likes getting up to mischief. Yes, here he gets up to absolutely anything that comes into his mind, but this, it seems, is his mission – to be present in this setting.
The traces of insurrection that the rebel leaves behind him are indeed manifestations of revolt – but of revolt that is unfolding within these four enclosed walls. Sometimes he looks at what is happening with indifference; sometimes, like a character in Goya, he submits to ‘the sleep of reason that gives birth to monsters’; sometimes he calms himself by playing the piano; and sometimes he does absolutely nothing. Balaclava guy is like that part of our reason, our personality, which is always to be found in each one of us: destructive, blinkered, real, cynical, and desperate to make a break for freedom. This is the part of us which we try to hold back and won’t let go of. But when we leave it shut up in the restrictions we have invented, the rules and public norms which we have learned, we merely fuel its edgy frustration by denying this inner conflict an outlet.
The confidence with which the rebel functions in these conditions creates the impression that he has completely mastered the space and the objects inside it. He takes out his fury, fatigue, and frustration on the walls of the houses in order to convey his dissatisfaction with the current public paradigm, the distribution of goods, and the stagnation of society’s views. This mutiny inside old-money residences is a metaphor for the destruction from within of the routine principles for forming criteria for art: a debunking of the conservative system that dominates our institutions and collectors. Lighting up a cigarette in a comfortable armchair, the guy in the balaclava throws a hail of spiky shurikens on the silk rugs and criticizes with affected elegance the contemporary culture of consumption of art – a culture that is superficial, automatic, and in the power of stereotypes and big money.
The rebel in the balaclava is not just a piece of imagery but a figure materialized in digital space, the artist’s alter ego. From physical canvases on which the digital painting was printed, this figure migrated into the metaverse – where it had no difficulty in adapting. It is no accident that the artist’s pseudonym contains the word ‘pigeon’ – meaning an extremely adaptive animal. The transition to the blockchain medium came naturally to DotPigeon, who had worked on the border between analogue and digital art from the very beginning. In his NFT objects the fashionable interiors continue to serve as façade decoration but undergo a slight change of appearance. To fit trends in the metaverse, DotPigeon use as décor for his ‘rooms’ works by crypto artists such as Fvckrender, Mad Rabbits Riot Club, BAYC, and Crypto Mories.
NFT technology makes it possible for DotPigeon not just to animate a static painting, bringing parts of it to life, but also to create works that literally move. Nothing Beats a Gang, for instance, evolves in its degree of vandalism as each new collector hits the next re-sale price level.
Trying to break out beyond the bounds of the space of the painting, whether the latter takes the form of a canvas or a blockchain entry, DotPigeon’s avatar manages to penetrate reality, even if in its enhanced version. The AR-version rebel can wander through uncharted locations and interact with art objects from the physical world, creating new scenarios of disorder and destruction. ‘We’ve changed places, right?’
As figures from digital pictures enter our reality, we are digitizing ourselves and our surroundings. We construct these demo versions of familiar spaces, training ourselves to imitate interiors and settings, preparing the ground for a major flight scene. We all want a place like this – a secluded spot free of the restrictions and rules of the real world. And it seems we agree to this act of escapism into the metaverse, provided we can possess it. We agree to substitute for figures who have been locked up in a skilful imitation of a wealthy setting. But what if, instead of playing at simulacra, we discover a place like this in our own minds, in our oown headspace?
After all, it’s all in your headspace