Designboom_ From ‘The Girl with a Pearl Earring’ by Johannes Vermeer to the ‘Mona Lisa’ by Leonardo da Vinci, Fuat Değirmenci transports Renaissance masterpieces into the digital sphere, stripping them down to bold, minimal brushstrokes. The series of modern 3D renderings titled ‘Minimal Renaissance’ digitally reinterprets some of the world’s most renowned paintings, encapsulating their original essence through lines, perspectives, colors, and light, illustrated in a contemporary expression. Emphasizing the movement’s ‘rebirth’ of human-centered understanding of thought, Değirmenci’s simplification of these infamous, historic artworks hones in on their fundamental underlying beauty.

Recently, the visual and motion artist has launched this series as a collection of phygital NFTs with Dubai’s Art World Creation NFT Gallery. Each purchased NFT also comes with a physical framed digital screen, both of which have been minted together by Octopus Signage.

Fuat Değirmenci’s ‘Minimal Renaissance’ further revives the enlightening rediscovery of humanism that initially emerged during the Renaissance movement with a modern reinterpretation. In his distinctly bold and experimental style, the artist reimagines some of the most significant paintings created by the most revered masters between the 14th and 17th centuries. Johannes Vermeer’s ‘The Girl with a Pearl Earring,’ Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Self-Portrait,’ Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Salvador Dalí’s ‘The Elephants’ are given new life as evocative 3D artworks engaged in delicate motion.

In the production process, Değirmenci began by mapping out the basic forms and tones of the paintings in a 2D plane, removing the intense, realistic details of the works in order to emphasize the expressive renaissance (‘rebirth’) underneath. This is achieved in the simplified recreation of forms and intricate elements, including linear perspectives, organic colors, and dramatic light, which collectively recall the intrinsic atmosphere of renaissance art. The designs were then enhanced in 3D modeling software to produce minimal, sweeping textured brushstrokes while preserving the original paintings’ identities.

In collaboration with NFT gallery Art World Creation Dubai and digital display agency Octopus, ‘Minimal Renaissance’ has been released as a collection of phygital NFTs, bridging traditional and digital art and innovative technology. The project integrates a new signage software technology developed by Octopus into the NFT ecosystem. When purchased, each NFT artwork also comes locked into a framed digital screen, allowing owners to display their pieces physically as they wish.