Feb. 2025, by EDOUARD, Head of Arts at Artcrush

For my first Focus article for Artcrush, it is only fit that I choose to present Louis-Paul Caron as he was the first artist to be included in my collection of on-chain tokenized digital artworks—alright that’s a fancy name for art NFTs. Caron, a French digital artist and animation film director born in 1995, trained at prestigious institutions like the École Boulle, the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands, has recently emerged as a leading figure in the realm of digital art.

Some of Caron’s work, rooted in art history, draws inspiration from neoclassical paintings and masterpieces of the Renaissance, blending classical art aesthetics with modern digital tools. His reinterpretations of works by artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Jacques-Louis David retain the original compositions and formats but are imbued with a contemporary aesthetic characterized by purity and elegance.

Louis-Paul Caron — Une Table avec Vue — INCENDIES series (2024)

Progressively, Caron’s art became more than an exercise in aesthetics; it also became a medium for exploring most particularly the issue of climate change. The first series of those works use 3D software to depict futuristic landscapes altered by the effects of heat, staging half-human, half-celestial characters in enigmatic, cinematic settings, bridging the gap between reality and fiction. The newest works on the same subject are more realistic in nature, and feel perhaps more contemporary than futuristic, even though they’re created with the assistance of AI and are depicting the scenes with an Edward Hopper aesthetic.

A hallmark of Caron’s work is his ability to tell compelling stories through digital media, crafting immersive worlds that both evoke nostalgia and envision possible futures, a true testament to the communicational power of digital art, that is not only made possible by the technological breaking down of geographical and logistical barriers, but also by the form and content of the artwork itself.