As a young man, Marín Gest spent a part of his youth in San Lius Potosí, Mexico, where he was first exposed to the mysticism and cultures of the vast Mexican desert. It was there that he discovered the writings of Spanish author, Carlos Castenada, and was then fortunate to have spent time with the Huicholes, one of the tribes that Castaneda wrote of. He was welcomed by a shaman to participate in their rituals using the sacred Peyote cactus, allowing him to experience the journey of their culture and encountering their central deity, Mescalito, the god of Peyote.
He recalls striding alongside a herd of wild horses through fields filled with thousands of fireflies, as he sensed Mescalito, his guide, ever present, leading him astray, and then returning him, inspiring and depriving him of feeling. It was like nothing he had experienced before nor since. He sensed Mescalito was both a manifestation of himself and of humanity. He felt a primordial human curiosity shared by all cultures, a drive towards ever greater awareness, the curiosity and multiplicity of countless indigenous cultures worldwide.
As an artist, he had spent years searching for the best medium to express the ethereal concept of Mescalito and pondered how to introduce him from the Mexican desert to the wider world. By the summer of 2022, Marín Gest had a clear vision - it was that Mescalito was deep in the desert in the middle of a sacred peyote ritual, when in that precise moment a tsunami came steaming across the Mexican desert striking and fusing him with a starfish inside the wave. In an instant, Marín Gest realized that he could bring this vision to life in a collection of digital paintings via the world’s most cutting-edge technology, the blockchain, forever meant to be known as “Mescalito Starfish.”
The primary objective of this collection is to provide a platform, through illustrations in digital oil paint, through which the viewing public may see a reflection of themselves and some aspect of their cultural background; along with raising awareness for human induced climate change. By striving to achieve a high level of accuracy in the visual representation of facial expressions and peripheral cultural items, Marín Gest aims to elicit a sentimentally empathetic response from a viewer who themselves have felt similar emotions, and in such a way, provide that viewer with the catharsis that comes from the realization of a shared sense of humanity.
The ideal collector of Mescalito Starfish is an art collector interested in the exploration of the ethereal aspects of the human condition, as well as sophisticated figurative painting; a buyer who appreciates meticulously created hand-painted art made with such a level of dedication that even details such as the pores of the nose are not overlooked. Mescalito Starfish comprises a limited community of owners who understand and value the commitment involved in producing contemporary digital oil paintings based on the principles of academic art passed down from the fundamental teachings of classical Greece.
Expanding on the concept of the original NFT collection, "Mescalito Starfish", this second generation collection envisions what would happen if the still images of the original collection were to 'eat' a (hallucinogenic) peyote button. Two new artists join Marín Gest in hand painting a new surreal and psychedelic family of traits, which upon minting use A.I. generated animation in the transformation of the original corresponding traits of the initial NFT image into their new psychaleidoscopic ones.