Zeuchnungen

Zeuchnung #4. Token 2 of the 2024 collection, and a clear case of overlay. A vertical band of salmon, ochre and red acrylic runs up the sheet, cut across by short black brushstrokes. Over it drifts a rendered plume of grey smoke, thick at the left and right edges and thinning to nothing across the middle. The smoke is the software artefact: soft, volumetric, evenly lit, obviously computed, laid over the hard physical drag of the brush. Where the paint records a fixed gesture, the smoke stays weightless, and the contrast between the two is the image.

A sheet with clip-art. Orange and vermilion acrylic strokes cover most of the page, with blue-pencil scribbles underneath. Into the top-right corner the artist drops a piece of ready-made 3D imagery: a glossy chrome sphere against a cartoon rain cloud shedding a neat row of droplets. The stock object is deliberately banal, and its slick catalogue-render finish is completely at odds with the smeared paint around it. The clash is not softened.

Thread. Token 0 of the collection, and the subtractive method at its most controlled — though it was made by a longer loop between hand and machine than the others. It starts from a graphite drawing of a family portrait: figures in a tangled embrace, clasped hands stacked at the centre. That drawing was edited so that large parts of the bodies and faces drop to flat white, leaving only thin outline contours where volume used to be; the edited image was printed on a laser printer, worked back over by hand in pencil, and scanned again. What remains reads as a photograph with its subjects half-deleted, the blank shapes carrying as much weight as the drawn ones, and the title names the few loose lines still threading the voids together. Unlike most of the series, Thread's physical version was not lost — the laser print reworked in pencil is in a private collection.

A crayon sheet, sliced. Here the ground is a loose pencil-and-crayon figure in brown, blue, teal and yellow. Five tall white triangles are dropped over it, tapering to points at top and bottom, as if wedges of the sheet had been lifted out and left blank. Same operation as Thread, blunter instrument: instead of following the drawn form, the voids are hard geometric wedges punched straight through a soft hand-drawn surface.

Untitled (beast swirl). A dense grey composite. Hand-drawn ink hatching and a half-animal, half-figure form are folded into a generative field of fine swirling lines — the kind of smooth, layered curve a plotter or particle routine produces, not a hand. The two line systems interleave until it is hard to say where the drawn marks stop and the computed ones begin, which is the opposite strategy to Zeuchnung #4: instead of a clean contrast between physical and digital, here they are dissolved into each other.

Boarish. A square, high-contrast black-and-white piece. A thresholded photographic texture — matted fur, an animal snout at the edges — is crossed with engraving-style hatching and then broken by hard rectangular blocks that sit slightly out of register, like a displaced image tile or a compression glitch. The photographic, the drawn and the software-error registers are stacked on the same square, none given priority. The title bends the market-sentiment words of trading — bullish, bearish — into Boarish, matching the boar in the image and, van den Dorpel suggests, taking a jab at the hype-driven uncriticality of the NFT space the work was minted into.

Zeuchnung #19. Token 1 of the 2024 collection, and the most nearly straight drawing of the group: a seated figure built from black ink masses, an ochre wash and grey pencil hatching, ringed by blue-pen scribbles, with only light digital handling. Note that the token numbers do not track the # in the titles — token 1 is Zeuchnung #19, token 2 is Zeuchnung #4, token 0 is Thread — because only a selection of the series was minted, not the whole run in order.