81 Landscapes

81 Landscapes is a collection of 81 on-chain* NFT landscapes by Rafaël Rozendaal and builds on his earlier NFT collection 81 Horizons that was central to his solo exhibition at Folkwang Museum in Essen in 2023 and was acquired by collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

81 Landscapes is a series of still images that suggest landscapes wherein the abstraction of the images leaves the viewer with the suggestion, or even creation, of movement, as though the places represented are waiting for something to happen in them. The viewer is left captivated with anticipation, much like before the start of a videogame, or as the artist puts it – ‘the suggestion of movement is more interesting than animating it, the works are like an empty room full of possibilities.’

Within Rozendaal’s coded websites and NFTs, he explores the essence of figurative and abstract animations. Landscapes are a recurring theme, that often occurs through spontaneous movement. His earlier project 81 Horizons was the first time he made a digital artwork of a non-moving landscape. It embodied the complete reduction of a landscape that’s possible within code. (The smart contract of 81 Horizons was deployed in September 2023, with the code being partly by Reinier Feijen and Alberto Granzotto).

The 81 Landscapes exist on the same level of reduction as the 81 Horizons, but the transition of the colors doesn’t happen with a hard cut but within a smooth color gradient. The landscapes are made more intuitively, with some existing of 2, 3, or 4 different colors. Resulting in more atmospheric and photographic images. Each of the 81 Horizons can be seen as a diagram of a landscape, and the 81 Landscapes show the unique atmosphere a landscape can embody.

Click here for an overview of all the existing 81 Landscapes.

* On-chain: The purest form of NFT existence, wherein an NFT is completely hosted on the Ethereum blockchain, without it depending on other services.