A Life of Wonder

I found my way to NFTs, not because of the stories of them selling for millions of dollars, or because they’re all the rage in my social circle. I found my way to NFTs through an artist whose work awakened my soul. His art and NFTs are alive and colorful–as serious as they are playful, and unafraid to explore life’s shadows.

Meet the artist, Pablo Esteban Sánchez Rijlaarsdam (AKA REY). He recently joined our conversation of young global leaders to share the vision of his art and what’s happening with NFTs.

NFTs have given his work new life, he shared. They “let me put life in my work by animating them.” He revealed that in his culture, death is something that is lived with and even made fun of. And you can see this as a theme in his work. The tension between his vibrant vision and the themes of death and family provide a lens that you can look through, like a kaleidoscope, to see the world in new ways. 

Pablo is a poet of the best kind–one who invites you into his world. Have a peek in the gallery below.

 “The beauty of the blockchain is that it’s eternal,” he told us.  “Eternal in a sense that it lives more than physical work. So that’s one thing I love, that the physical can go and be destroyed, but there’s always the soul which is the NFT.”  He offered that the center of the art world has changed. Where it once was New York, or Paris, it’s now Twitter.

Follow his invitation to this new center. His beautiful works which await you there.

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At night, we walk to the black ocean. In the blackness, and the the cold. In the starlessness, we walk. Hand in hand, saying nothing, waiting for the wind to subside. We approach each other open mouthed, shivering and gasping for lips or air. 

You played in copper bathtubs with imaginary boats sailing on the soap. Attended by widows of unreal wars. Husbands died without knowing why. Unrealized. Never to taste fatherhood.

Widows who raised the sons they never had, raised them alone, raised them with dreams unfilled, like letters unwritten, unsent, unseen from the battlefield. 

I am of them, and of the juniper tree.

I am of simple mind with heart dotted in a vermillion, spelling out “home” in Morse Code. 

-Zjb

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