Ricky Allman, the world-renowned artist behind the paintings in Max Mellenbruch’s Kialara Messengers edition, offers us a chance to have a glimpse at our future. His painting, “Yearning for the Particle Wave”, reflects on a world injected by the bitcoin revolution, in search of new alternatives to define itself in between the many pairs of polarities that sustain our reality. A dance with utopia and dystopia, light and darkness, form and shapelessness, structure and noise. Light itself stands in the middle of this duality between particle and wave, just as humans stand in the duality between the physical and the digital world, constantly choosing where we want to inhabit and how we wish to define ourselves.

“Yearning for the Particle Wave” places us at the center of the tensions that define the cities of the future. On one hand, digital intelligence reaches exponential levels of innovation in a Darwinian journey towards creative evolution, and on the other, blockchain provides the structures that sustain our sense of society, keeping autonomous entities accountable for their choices and actions in a realm of infinite possibilities.

The rigid geometry of Allman’s painting, which gradually loses its identity as we approach the center of the convoluted metropole, is a visual metaphor for the city of the future, in which entities founded upon logical systems gradually merge into the informational noise that accumulates at the kernel of the city’s being.

The contrast between the two regions of the painting reflects a city that sustains itself in between the depths of the underworld and the soaring structures that attempt to reach for a higher world. Down below lurks the darkness of a past with its well defined rigid geometric structures that once ruled society. Up above, the city almost dissolves into noise struggling to incorporate the level of logical and abstract information as we gain access to higher frequency bands. We can identify with this city that emerges from its visceral unconscious structures and attempts to propagate more sustainable and intelligent forms of growth. Megacities reach for the light aiming to control the pollution we create by converting nature into the digital realm in which we live and exchange bitcoin.

“Will our modes of perception sustain the reproductive rate of our informational systems?”, is one of the questions that this painting seems to ask. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin warned us even before the dawn of the digital era, revolutions in the means of reproduction do not only alter economic or power structures, but the very mode of sense perception.

“Yearning for the Particle Wave” as a commentary on our cities, is also a reflection of human consciousness on a very subjective scale, steaming up as the amount of information it digests reaches close to the limits of its organic limitations. Art is again reaffirmed as a necessity for survival and as a tool for the creation of new models that allow the city to resignify itself and prevent its dissolution into meaninglessness.

This painting and its counterpart "When the Pull of Gravity Becomes Too Strong" are part of an in-progress series, inspired by the cities of the blockchain era, which will contain between 5-8 paintings.

Ricky is a long time supporter of bitcoin, specially for its ability to empower artists worldwide. Seven years ago, he sold his first painting for bitcoin, drawing 20 btc. Since then, he’s been selling and buying art for the currency, turning into an active user since then. Last year, Ricky was able to buy a house for his growing family that just received a new baby, thanks to his crypto earnings.

- Yasmim Franceschi

Materials: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 29x36" (74x91cm)

Weight: 5lbs (2.2kg)

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