Exhibition text, Franco Verrascina solo show. Valeries Factory, October 2024.
Frenetik Void is the alias under which artist Franco Verrascina has developed a renowned career in the field of crypto-art. Even before the advent of Web 3.0, Verrascina published and exhibited his digital compositions in various online galleries, platforms, and social networks such as Tumblr, the Glitch Artists Collective group on Facebook, and later on Instagram. These images—created through a combination of drawing software, image generation, and 3D modeling—found not only a marketplace but an entire ecosystem within the distribution and commercialization system made possible by the rise of blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens (robustly encrypted certifications for creating unique digital objects). Blockchain provided a decentralized, local, and global community where these works could be promoted.
In 2020, Verrascina founded a channel on the social network Discord called Cryptoarg, which became a collaborative community aimed at facilitating the onboarding of artists interested in minting their digital works as NFTs. There, he collaborated with other artists to create collective
drops, raising the profile of participants while sharing recommendations on how to navigate an exciting yet fraught world susceptible to scams and shady dealings. As part of a small group of young artists who embraced this new medium from its inception, Verrascina is considered a key figure in a scene that developed very early in Argentina. Globally, this technology revolutionized how infinitely replicable creations became collectible, establishing a form of digital scarcity whose long-term impact remains difficult to assess. Verrascina’s imagery is a surrealist manifestation of an unconscious shaped by simulations, video games, and the egregore of an increasingly hallucinated planet. An early adopter of image-generation programs using artificial intelligence, Verrascina says he seeks what he calls “the spark” within the abyssal multiplicity of images generated by an algorithm he himself trained. This concept echoes Barthes’ “punctum”
when addressing the artistic value of another monumental technological disruption that unleashed a sea of images: photography. This intuition sets Verrascina’s work apart from many other creators in the crypto world, who often seem content with the luxurious surface of a dazzling finish.
In his exhibition “Sereno de mi mente” (2023), Verrascina began his foray into the contemporary art world (which the crypto community somewhat mockingly refers to as “traditional art”). There, the artist presented an immersive and interactive installation that combined autobiographical references with video game mechanics in an exploration of how to embody his screen-and-platform-native painting practice in the offline space (which the online commu-
nity, also somewhat mockingly, refers to as “meatspace”). The exhibition _PARA EDITAR delves deeper into this conceptual and material densification of digital art.
By developing an industrialized constructive system for presenting luminous images, the works break free from standardized monitors, inaugurating a material language that makes explicit the technical, social, and cultural infrastructure upon which the infinite simulations of cyberspace are executed. This process occurs in parallel with the refinement of the generative techniques used to create images, feeding he artist’s vast visual production archive back into the AI. The result is the creation of a sort of artificial double of the artist, with whom he communicates in a “near-telepathic” manner to obtain layers and fragments for new compositions. This enables creative processes transmuted by both vertiginous speed and the unpredictability of a practice that moves away from obsessive pixel manipulation.
In _PARA EDITAR, the combination of a strategy to reify Verrascina’s digital works and the increasing automation of his compositional technique signals the beginning of a new era in artistic production and human activity in general—a kind of “art in the age of technical generativity,” where productive labor and creative expression blur into a superimposition where the virtual and the real become indistinguishable. The digital beings and biomechanical amalgams inhabiting Frenetik Void’s imagination carry the urgency of a present in which this mutation has already been consummated, and its deepening accelerates exponentially.
.