“The Art” or art xcvi (XCVI) is a neo-expressionist, visionary, past and future orientated artist. He is widely known with his own style of making art known as wabi sabi which he explains as “acknowledging that there is beauty in imperfection and even though it is something that I believe in,I am experimenting with different styles at the moment”.
“art” means the products of human creativity or the creation of a beautiful or significant thing and “xcvi” means 96 in ancient roman numerals. The name is spelled with small caps and it is a combination of Kamohelo’s religion and passion which is art and the year which he was born in, 1996.
‘art xcvi’s’ or rather known as Kamohelo Morobe by close family and friends is a 20 year old Renaissance multimedia manipulator, multi-talented and art-conscious artist/graphic designer. “The Modern Day Basquiat” prides himself in creating artistic treasure out of nothing and somehow always manages to organically capture emotion and captivate the viewers interests and enthusiasm through the different ranges of work he does which includes digital drawings and designs, pencil sketches, event posters, and animation just to name a few. Art xcvi is the definition of a modern day African Renaissance kid from the streets of Ebony Park, Midrand South Africa.
art xcvi Presents TheArt
Kamohelo “art xcvi” Morobe was born and raised in Midrand, South Africa where he fell in love with the idea of art as a little kid. Him and I went to the same primary school in the dusty township of the East Rand, Ivory Park Primary School and upon our first few interactions he struck me as a self–conscious and a very conserved kid who isolated himself from his surroundings. The only people whom he socially engaged with freely were close friends who weren’t as like-minded as the rest of the kids at school. While the ordinary kid was trying to be popular at school, The Art and his friends were always gathered away from everybody else, sharing ideas,compliments, new techniques and opinions of each other’s drawings of cars and Dragon Ball Z cartoons and other fictional characters which were popular at the time. I found it very fascinating to see their enthusiasm and so much passion over a hobby that would later become art xcvi’s true destiny.
Years later… By fate and omens, we got enrolled to the same high school, same class (8th grade) and he still concealed himself among the population of our noisy classmates. The only thing he did besides having an interest in the girls at school was drawing, drawing, drawing and more drawing! The following year (2011) xcvi changed schools. He got a transfer and moved to a new high school named New Horizon College; a mixed boarding school in the Free State province, in a city named Harrismith. Personally I’d say this is when I started noticing world class improvement in his drawing skills, eager for perfection and the expression of vivid visions, which made him stand out among any other young sketcher who aspired to be an artist at the time. Every time he’d come back home from the Free State for the holidays he’d always come back with masterpieces that raised the benchmark of drawing among his peers, others were inspired while others envied, but nothing could stop him now, The Art was only getting started.
Sketches of World Star Artist : J Cole by art xcvi
I began to understand his quietness a little better every time I spent more time with him. We were becoming good friends, the more I looked closely and analysed each & every one of his art pieces is the more I started understanding why he was always isolated from his surroundings as if he was in a trance. In my own opinion, It all made sense to have such a strange character show you a different side of characters through the eyes of a canvas. This is widely because his art-works have done the talking for him and if you are not aware of this it may be simple for you to misinterpret his real persona especially to basic stereotypes.
I remember in 2014 while he was still at boarding school, he initiated his own label for his own designs, he called it “THE_VRT” which means The art, he distributed a series of his art-pieces on social media to make people aware of his art movement. The following year after matriculating at New Horizon boarding school he enrolled at Midrand Graduate Institute (MGI) for a course in graphic designing. This life changing decision increased his knowledge and passion for art to greater frontiers which extended what he had already learnt at his boarding school. This synchronized perfectly with the graphic designer in him and didn’t hinder him from reaching greatness it only made him greater.
Mandela Tribute By art xcvi
While acquiring new information and techniques of making art, he embarked on new journey and began creating album covers for many upcoming artists, face sketches, digital drawings but above all those, sketching females seemed to be what tickled his creativity and consumed most of his sketching time, he even came to a point where he admitted to me that he gets his inspiration from sketching beautiful girls, which is quite natural for an artist of his kind seeing that he was widely influenced by Pablo Picasso and Michel-Jean Basquiat who also had those similarities.
I once asked him “why do you like to draw sketches of girls so much”?
He replied “Because it’s worth it”.
That wouldn’t be surprising if you keep in mind that he is a visionary raised by a single mother who’s been very supportive towards his passion for art from a young age.
In 2015 he made a collection of art-works filled with different beautiful girls who seemed to be his inspiration at the time,I guess. He distributed this collection one by one all over different social media platforms which gained him a lot of recognition and credibility because most of these girls were popular in the areas they were based in, Some of them were popular on social media as well.
THE VRT Collektion By art xcvi.
Now that people were aware of his talent and had given him the credibility that was attracted by his hard work, he had to introduce people to his art stories, he was going through a phase of change where he was getting different inspirations towards his fantastic work.This caused his skills to escalate him to become a greater artist each and everyday! It was really impressive to observe him evolve to his own style of art which is unorthodox and very expressive.He then later released a different collection of portraits that are made up of different formats of images like photographs, cartoons, digital drawings/paintings. Almost like a digital version of neo-expressionism.
The Migraine Collektion By art xcvi
I remember asking him “what happened to the girls?”
He replied “Basquiat and Picasso happened”
I was confused by what he had just said to me but that gave me the drive to look into the history, documentaries and previous work of Michel-Jean Basquiat, Pablo Picasso, Michel Angelo and other great artists he had mentioned to me. After finding out who they were and the impact they had on the world stage of art in the 21st century, I analyzed them carefully and realised that most of these artists possess characteristics that are similar to art xcvi, how do I know this? They spent most of their time working on meaningful masterpieces, they expressed more what they felt through their work more than what they saw. Picasso and Basquiat (his favourite artists) got a lot of inspiration from females in their art but always evolved their work into higher levels by becoming as inventive as possible.
Digital Hieroglyphics Collektion By art xcvi
He told me that he believes God is an artist and we are all his masterpieces. He also believes that our art reflects who we are the same way that ‘6’ reflects ‘9’(a more detailed explanation of ‘xcvi’). Throughout our knowledgeable conversations we spoke about hieroglyphics which he uses a lot in his recent work and how much they fascinate him. Which lead me to asking him the ultimate questions about what his future plans were, to which he replied: ”I wanna work with Markham, I wanna work with Hype Magazine, I wanna work and create more with my friends ICONiX SA and lastly I would love to work with Loyiso Mkize”
I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed, so I asked him “at the same time?” and he laughed and said yes!
This again reminded me of his work ethic and his fire-burning passion for art. I think he’s going to emerge as one of the greatest artists of our generation simply because his work is undeniable, very attractive and above all, it’s like a breath of fresh air to the art scene! Below are some the latest collections of art xciv’s work. Blakk Renaissance will be reviewing every collection that this Renaissance artist offers and beyond.
The Kalour Collektion By art xcvi
#blakkRenaissance by Lord Kenn
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