New horizons await meta-luxury Italian brand Visionnaire as it enters the world of NFTs in collaboration with American artist Jonathan Monaghan. The project marks an innovative synergy between artist and brand, the contemporary and the antique in a creation that pushes outside the traditional boundaries of interior design, establishing a world all its own.
Visionnaire represents the touchstone of the quality and luxury of interior design Made in Italy and boasts years of international experience in over 55 countries, working with custom creations for high-end hotels, residential spaces, and solutions for both the yachting and the aviation industries as well.
Recently crowned a Benefit Company, Visionnaire, which can be found in over 30 mono-brand stores and a network of multi-brand department stores all over the globe, focuses on doing business that promotes positive values for the communities where it operates.
The company is the gatekeeper of a heritage of timeless beauty and quality based on artisanal wisdom that underpins each one of its designs and acts as the foundation for all of its new endeavors. Here, creativity and imagination are intrinsic to the company’s ability to take the highest quality materials and turn them into exquisite designs that adorn the rooms of exclusive environments.
With an eye to cultivating the best that Made in Italy has to offer, the brand has announced the launch of Visionnaire NFT and its collaboration with renowned American artist Jonathan Monaghan. The fresh, new project delves into the world of Non-Fungible Tokens and the innovative design methods they offer to the world of luxury interior design.
Monaghan, known for his extraordinary ability to interpret the relationship between physical sculpture and 3D animation has a keen talent for breathing life into objects and narratives that lie beyond the conventional language of contemporaneity. Well-experienced in the market of NFTs, he began using the bitcoin blockchain nine years ago to authenticate digital artwork and has continually been featured in the crypto art space, even participating in the groundbreaking launch of the first crypto.com NFT.
Internationally acclaimed, Monaghan has exhibited at the Sundance Festival, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His current collaboration with Visionnaire is the result of like finding like, as both artist and brand share a belief in the implicit value of bringing harmony and beauty to life.
Together, Visionnaire and Monaghan chose to reimagine the cultural masterpiece Apollo del Belvedere that is housed in the Vatican Museums in Rome. The statue is an original Roman re-creation of a bronze work by Leochares that has attracted great admiration through the centuries. German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann once said, “of all the works of antiquity that have escaped destruction, the statue of Apollo represents the highest ideals of art.”
The work depicts the divine Greek archer Apollo and is a symbol of aesthetic perfection and harmony that draws the attention to a vital future-focused tension – the ideal icon for this new venture that traces the language of art from post-Hellenic to the moon landing in ’72 to the current disruptive presence of the digital art world.
Carved from Carrara marble, the life-size bust appears to be wrapped in capitonné leather in a nod to the world of furniture, merging the contemporary with the push-and-pull of contrasts present in the original Roman work as softness and lightness, virtual and physical, past and future play off of each other.
The work’s first debut can be found on the marketplace Foundation, an important digital platform for artists, curators, and collectors working within the new creative economy, and will be on display in the Wunderkammer in June. Visionnaire NFT will be officially launched during the 26th edition of Miart and the sculpture will be put up for sale along with a dedicated NFT plus during the 60th edition of Milan’s Salone del Mobile.