Pepenardo

Pepenardo, who also signs work as Nardo and X-NARDO, is a pseudonymous painter who spent more than a decade inside the traditional art world before crypto art pulled him in. He moved to Chicago in 2010 to study painting and art history, then worked as a fabricator, studio assistant and manager for prominent contemporary artists in Chicago and New York. In 2021 he found Fake Rares, the artist run Pepe collective on Counterparty and Bitcoin, through Twitter, and started posting hand painted Pepe oil paintings under the Pepenardo name. His signature move is embedding Pepe the Frog and other memes into the canon of art history with full oil painting craft: the Mona Lisa turned green with Guy Fawkes features, Napoleon crossing the Alps in Nikes on a green horse, Duchamp's Fountain occupied by a Skibidi Toilet head. He frames viral memetics as a kind of digital transcendence, and the tension between labor intensive oil painting and lo fi meme culture is the point. His physical paintings sell with paired tokens through Bitcoin auction house Scarce City, including the WAKEMEUPEPE framed painting and token, and his work has been covered by Outland and shown with AOTM Gallery.

Oil paintings that graft Pepe the Frog and internet memes onto masterpieces of art history, sold as physical works paired with tokens on Bitcoin. Named works include FAKEPEPELISA, FAKEGENESIS, FREEDOMWAR, COMPUTER DEATH and WAKEMEUPEPE, alongside Fake Rares cards.

• FAKEPEPELISA, the Pepe Mona Lisa that pulled him into Fake Rares
• FAKEGENESIS, Napoleon as a Guy Fawkes rider in oil (2022)
• WAKEMEUPEPE physical painting and token auction on Scarce City
• COMPUTER DEATH (2024)
• Hand painting meme culture in classical oil technique
• Fake Rares collective member

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