Jæn interviewed by creator_collection. This post first appeared on HERE

The blog is really growing nicely and I’ve been so honored to get to know so many artists in such a short period. This feature is on SuperRare artist Jæn, who has been recognized as one of the best 200 illustrators worldwide. I’m the proud owner of two of Jaen’s other pieces and if you know Jaen he is on point with his GIF game and always has smart and progressive ideas. Cheers to you Jaen!

**If you’re an artist and want to be featured, please DM me on Twitter to get more info**   

I got accepted on SuperRare first during the end of the year 2020, but only started in February 2021.

In the southwest of France, in Bordeaux and the surrounding countryside. It’s all forests, beaches, city life, wine and cheese.

Surreal, dreamy and psychedelic. Quirky, trippy, colorful, and weird are other adjectives that make sense as well.

Find me here on Twitter, but also on IG here. 

“I’ll Be What You Want Me To Be”.

If I hadn’t been so bad at science, I would have become an astrophysicist or a quantum physicist. I follow closely the new mysteries unveiled by scientists around the world, and things like time crystals are so mind-blowing I don’t understand why it’s not more covered by general media and better popularised. It changes how we understand the very fabric of reality, and is extremely fascinating to me.

At the bottom of this piece, you can see a multicolour polygonal heart shape: the Amplituhedron. The theory behind this – as I understand it with my humble scientific skills – is that if you look deeper into the foundations of reality than subatomic particles (like quarks and other strange characters such as virtual particles), geometrical patterns of scattering for said particles emerge. They follow the lines of this Amplituhedron (which has way more dimensions than 3), as if somehow, the utmost fundamental foundations of reality would not be individual particles or waveforms on a scalar field, but the geometry of their interactions. Interactions, rather than identity. Let that sink in. The sacred geometry-like star pattern emerging from the kind of meta-black hole in the middle is another hint at this possible geometric fabric of the universe.

For a fleeting couple of frames, this black hole-like part I call “le Mystère” sitting in the centre (symbolising that we are far from getting to the crux of it) will let appear another version of the whole in itself, when the human finger gently pokes. Even the software found it too meta and had me find a back door by fordbidding elements that “contained themselves”. Too much fractal metaphysics, it seems.

The rest of the particle looks like a multicolor, multifaceted body, showing two faces – as matter does in the quantum realm. Indeed, the setting of the experience determines if you will witness a waveform or a particle, as if it would be intrinsically neither (or both). Hence the title, as if all matter was whispering to you was “I’ll be what you want me to be.” 

The work is based on an illustration from 2018, that has been one of my most popular works, and a defining piece for years, also featured in a book called “Best 200 Illustrators Worldwide”.

Last but not least, I made the music at the same time as the animation. While it was tiring for my old trusty computer, both art forms informing each other and having a conversation, growing together, was truly a fascinating and fun process. I chose to have only 3 notes, for a very pure, minimal, almost celestial harmony, that contrasted with the more chaotic variety of the different sound sources and rhythmic patterns. It ended up like the mystique of science: beauty and harmony emerging from chaos.

There’s an obvious visual candy and trippy side to the piece, all colorful and softly wobbling. That would be the gateway to deeper contemplation, scientific knowledge and metaphysical wonder, I hope. In a way, I aim at making you feel the same way as you would when watching murmurations of birds (the word describes the sort of living cloud they sometimes form in the sky).

I avoid having a sole favourite in almost everything, I find it too diminishing, and a notion that is killing the richness of variety in all things, along unnecessary competition. That said, that piece, the two previous SuperRare drops (The Unexpected and Deep Thinking https://superrare.com/jaen/creations) and my incoming master series Cornælhuys (https://jaen.art/phase1) are the works I’m the most proud of, along with a commission for Disney to celebrate Mickey’s 90th Birthday.

See previous answer to get how tough that question is! I’ve been raised with Moebius, Dali, Magritte, Miyazaki, Disney and Toriyama as creative food. As for contemporary artists, I’ve written a Master’s thesis on Murakami Takashi (ex-japanese scholar here), so I became a bit emotionally attached, and love James Jean, Kilian Eng, T Wei, Monika Mitkuté (she’s a friend as well, super inspiring) and many many others. Specifically in NFTs, I started collecting Cosmic Nuggets (AKA Kozmik Nougat), Alexandra Zutto, Glowa, and soon Emma Voloup and Kristy Glas because they all are irreplaceable, they have character. Among the OGs, XCOPY and Alotta Money steal the show with the personality of their art. And lately, Bananakin has bluffed me with his wonky, weird, gritty 3D works.

Non-art probably means no music, but obviously, that’s my main thing out of visual (electronica, and singing/guitar/bass in rock-ish bands). I used to go bodyboarding on the Atlantic Ocean, have a mycophile addiction, and enjoy normal stuff like partying, contemplating nature, friends, and so on.

I’m a veggie, and while I’m aware of the horror behind dairy, I’m sadly addicted to cheese. But what can you do when you live in the country of 400 hundred cheeses? Anything spicy is great too, and having lived in Japan, I kinda miss the local food that you can’t find here.