Early November 2021. The gremlin scours the bird app for new artworks to swipe. This #Tezos #CleanNft stuff keeps popping up in his feed. Curious.

Turns out it’s another chain, and it houses a totally different art scene. Popular marketplaces are hic et nunc (HEN) and objkt. A strange new world appears of low prices, high editions, and phenomenal artwork. The gremlin’s discovered the underground.

After a fevered binge of tezos art collecting, the dust settles and he wanders into the discord of @limbouniverse: LIMBO’s Treehouse. There he meets several amazing artists, including the proprietor of the establishment, LIMBO.

The gremlin has managed to evade eviction ever since.

So who are you for people who don't know about you?

Who am I… I guess I can just be perceived as an illustrator and comics artist turned into nft artist?

And some of those who don’t know about my nft activity would just consider me an illustrator.

You are an illustrator by trade? What sort of work do you do in the real world?

In the real world I’ve been freelancing both with my style and with other styles in order to suit the commissioners’ interests.

So I worked on many different kinds of projects, even though I found them often very hard to finish because working outside of my zone of interest is pretty hard.

Could be companies asking for illustrations, or agents commissioning some work to do on other people’s books or comics.

I also worked with a band once. I illustrated a Vinyl edition of one of their albums. It was just an indie band called phraseland, nothing major, but still it was a cool commission.

So where did the handle LIMBO come from?

The handle Limbo comes from a specific moment in my life where I felt stuck and didn’t know what to do, and it more or less is coincident with when I started making my first drawings that would have then become part of the project.

I just used that moniker as an artist way prior to nfts, around 2018.

Online? Like on IG or something?

Yes I started using it on instagram. My handle there is cronachedallimbo which means limbo chronicles more or less, in Italian.

I used to make those drawings for pure fun and I ended up minting all of them on tezos basically, years later hahah.

Why do you make art? When did you first know that you were an artist?

Well I’ll answer the second question first. I think I have known I was an artist since my childhood. I’ve been drawing since a very young age, around when I was 3 years old, and during elementary school I already had the dream to become a comic book artist.

As about the why, the reasons are multiple. One is that I am not good at anything else. Another one is that I like to communicate something through my drawings, and I love the connections an art journey might create around an artist.

By connections, you mean interacting with other artists?

Yes, artists and human beings in general, which for an introvert is kind of a big achievement haha.

I’m new to any art scene, but the nft movement has a lot of interaction on discord and twitter, which I love. Were there similar interactions before that for you? Or is web3 more novel?

I used to be in an underground comic book scene here in Italy years ago and there were some real life interactions, yes. Also, I have been on instagram where I started interacting with other artists worldwide. But I have never seen anything as big as the nft art scene

So how'd you get into nfts?

I got into nfts because of an artist friend that I had met on instagram, called Unb0tmas. He basically reached out to me, was a fan of my artwork and wanted to send me the first tezos to try nfts out! My journey began like that, for pure fun and low risks.

Why tezos?

Tezos because it was the most accessible blockchain at that time. And it was really easy to start there for a noob like me. Also because he gave me this tezo for free and I wouldn’t have been able to afford any eth to get started. So since tezos was also thriving, I jumped in

When was this?

October 2021.

😂

50 years ago.

Anyway, I’m not established yet, how could I possibly have been back then?

Anyone on Tezos knows Limbo. So for someone who is totally unaware of you, how do you describe your work / style?

Oh, this is kind of a hard question.

I feel like my style has evolved from the start to now in many different ways. The anime side of it has really gained importance.

But if you look at my first drawings it was less present. I would say that my work is clearly inspired by some retro anime from the 80s and 90s, but it also has a surreal and a sci-fi side. I’m inspired by science fiction, magic, 80s manga, 60s American comic books, but also the weird and the psychedelic medieval art of painters like Hieronymus Bosch.

You mentioned comics in childhood, favorites?

Haha many but I would say that milestones like Akira by Otomo, Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons, and the whole body of work of Moebius are the things that have influenced me the most.

Do you have a piece you could describe about how it came about? If not I’ll ask about my fav, Ibis (Red Ibis Strange Dream).

Oh let’s talk Ibis yes!!

Well Ibis really came out of a bad dream I had. It was created in 2021, around 5 months before I joined the nft world.

I had this dream in which a red ibis was present and I went around an old house where a lot of weird things happened. It was like a weird party was going on.

When I woke up after that dream I decided to try and draw what I saw, more or less. Surrealism has influenced me a lot, I think in that piece it shows. It was inked on paper and coloured digitally.

Also Etchings and stuff like that.

Etchings?

Yeah, it’s an old artistic technique. There are some incredible surreal ethings from 1800 and earlier that have inspired me.

Stuff like this one from Goya for example!

I love Goya

Yeah incredible, one of my favorite trad artists.

What’s your process look like from idea to mint?

I usually wait for a specific vision to grow inside my mind. If that does not happen organically, I try to brainstorm or expose myself to as many sources of inspiration as possible. The vision may grow from a song, a tone of colour or a feeling, and get processed through my subconscious. After that comes a phase of planning in which I try to fit the vision inside of an ongoing series of pieces. I do some sketches, choose the best one out of them in terms of composition and then start working on the proper art. Since I want every piece to be familiar but different from the previous one, some ideas may get discarded in order to serve that purpose.

I would accuse you of being a perfectionist, is that accurate?

HAHAH. These are heavy accusations sir.

Yes I definitely am. Too much of a perfectionist for sure! But my brain doesn’t seem to be able to work in any other manner, even if I try to change my mindset. I am really obsessive compulsive when I make a piece, and try to craft it in order for it to kind of survive the test of time.

It shows in the work I think.

So one thing about nfts that detractors don't seem to get is they allow a market for digital work. “Digital work” is a very wide definition, you for instance add the flicker effect. Why'd you decide to do animated?

Oh yeah great question.

Yeah I feel like nfts have helped in making possible the expansion of the medium and its infinite possibilities. So in my case the flicker effect was just my way of expanding my illustrations in order to give them an extra layer of vibes and atmosphere.

And I feel that these illustrations work best as nfts. They are perfect for that specific format.

It’s effective, a Limbo is easily recognizable by colors and the effect. And by content on the black and whites.

Hahah “a Limbo” still makes me laugh.

It’s a Limbo!

It really is but it’s unbelievable sometimes.

Do people close to you irl know you are into nfts?

Yes my family and some of my closest friends know. Of course my family is filled with boomers who have a hard time understanding what I’m doing. But they always did, so it’s no big deal.

Better than trying to burn you at the stake.

Absolutely. They are curious but they have a hard time understanding the mechanics of this world. It’s also hard to understand them myself sometimes so yeah, quite normal.

My closest friends understand and some of them, like Lysios (@LysiosNFT) and even Mari (@MariMigraine), are making nfts too. So we can meet up rl and talk about what’s going on.

You knew them before nfts?

Yes yes I’ve been knowing them for years and years. Something like 5/7 years.

Did you get them into nfts?

No actually this is weird because we all approached nfts independently at different times. Stars alignment or word circulation haha. But it was a nice surprise.

Speaking of those devils, I think one of your greatest contributions to the space is the treehouse.

Hahah.

A place for like minded artists to explore the great unknown. A lot of back and forth happens there and the meme game is strong.

😂

Yes actually I was talking about this with another artist earlier. I think the wip space is invaluable for real. If an artist works completely alone it can mint something that has unnoticed mistakes for example. At the treehouse there have been many times in which these mistakes were avoided and we contributed in making some pieces stronger. I think that is just amazing.

Absolutely. I joined originally as a collector, and artists sharing other's work spreads the word. Especially about artists who aren’t even in the treehouse. You have a great eye and I've discovered amazing work there.

Thank you so much! You’re not the only collector that has said this to me.

I hope that even with the change in the blockchain I can manage to bring in quality art and quality artists, it helps everyone grow for sure.

That's a sore spot for some, but the underlying tech shouldn’t matter really, in my opinion.

But I want to keep having eyes on every blockchain anyway. There’s some art, specifically in tezos, that you can’t find anywhere else

I think artists should put their work wherever it will be successful.

Absolutely. I think that the tezos scene is still unbeatable for these exact reasons. But we’ll see what happens in the near future.

Yeah, I still love collecting on Tezos, but trends come and go on all chains.

I think that stuff like poppel’s (@Poppel20) is just too incredible to abandon collecting on tezos hahah.

My next question, who are some of your favorite contemporaries in the NFT space?

Oh well. I’d go for my personal sacred trinity here rn, which is at the moment @1BitNecro, @Psychedemon and @Kikillo. Those are the ones whose work is among the most exciting I’ve seen.

All great and hopefully down for interviews.

I want an in depth necro interview hahah.

I’ll get one.

Biggest fanboy here. Hahah. Perfect.

So for those who are now stoked on the Limbouniverse, what are your current plans / near future stuff you are working on? What is it, where can we get it?

Well here are 2 upcoming collabs that are gonna be bombing the internet in the near future.

One is with DigiNoise frontier on foundation. He is an experimental artist who has active collabs with people like kingxerox (@kingxerox5), Absolutely Wrong (@Abs0lutelywrong), another artist named Kaspar (@KasparKannelmae) whose art is very strong and I think you may like.

The other one announced will be with Psychedemon.

In terms of solo work I am willing to build a consistent series of 1/1s on foundation. But I also have plans about releasing more experimental work on tezos. I think that the themes in my illustrations might evolve and change again after I complete my Home Video Nostalgia collection currently ongoing on FND.

My plan is to get my fans to experience very different worlds series after series, all taking place in my personal Limbo Universe. So there will be different moods and explorations.