Tabor Robak

Smokers Paradise by @TaborRobak is a prestigious NFT art collection AND another contemporary art masterpiece. The more I study this project, the more I see how carefully constructed and multi-layered it is. The devil is in the details... and the depth beyond the surface exists in the juxtaposition of parallel dimensions, reflecting Tabor's remarkable ability to adapt and compress "data" into a universal language. Think of Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). Tabor takes iconic copyrighted anime posters and covers them with digitally rendered glass fruit and heavy impasto-like gestural painting. The original imagery is partly erased, as a symbolic intervention into the tradition of cultural exchange between East and West... Like Hokusai to Van Gogh, but in our post-internet body of work. Closer to our time, there's the obvious Burnt Banksy NFT (2021) parallel. Physical vs. digital, originality and scarcity. Except here, the collector makes the irreversible choice: one unique artwork exists either as a physical print or an Ethereum NFT. Never both. And with the NFT comes something more: part of this artwork can only be experienced through Web3, NFTs and onchain interactions... resulting in a handmade intervention by Tabor into the collector's Human Resources NFT. An existing artwork becomes part of another artwork's history through provenance... Community participation, provenance and scarcity become artistic materials. Add the dialogue between Japanese anime, Western art history, consumer culture, CGI and AI-assisted image-making. Look at the brushwork and details, how naturally the digital tools make these works feel like some weird form of futuristic painting, twisted into the mystery of what it means to paint in the extended field of painting. Heavy impasto is a suggestion of this... and with digital art, the concepts of "brush" and "paint" can lead to something unexpected. Tabor isn't simply making images and selling them as NFTs or prints. He's applying the logic of contemporary art to the structures of NFT culture itself. The collecting mechanism isn't separate from the artwork. It's part of the artwork. And that, to me, is what makes Smokers Paradise much more than a collection of 100 images. Best of both worlds... Collected physical 🍓and #002 Akira? More Info and the other piece in the comments.... #SmokersParadise #TaborRobak #CryptoArt #NFTArt #ContemporaryArt @Tabcorp_HR