The artist
Every collection has a few artists who stop being names attached to a wallet and start being people you check on. Joki is one of mine.
Three or four years now, mostly late nights in the Night Cap spaces, where he has spent more evenings on stage than I can count. Kind soul, quick laugh, one of my favorite people in this entire ecosystem to talk to. I hold 172 of his works across three chains. He is in my top five most collected artists of all time.
Start with the name, because almost nobody catches it. JOtham KIt ARroz GUintos. The handle was hiding inside his name the whole time. (his own bio)
The pen
He draws with ballpoint pens. Ordinary ones. The kind that live in the bottom of a bag or get lifted from a hotel front desk. He fills full sheets of coldpress watercolor paper with them, twelve by eighteen inches of cross-hatched biomechanical density, sometimes finished with white gel pen on toned board.
No undo. No layers. No opacity slider. Every line is permanent the second it lands, ballpoint does not blend and does not forgive, and the only way to get shadow is to lay down more line. A single piece is tens of thousands of strokes and any one of them can wreck it.
That discipline carries straight into the digital work. It is the same hand whether he is holding a Bic or a Wacom pen, which is why his pieces hold up when you zoom in. There is no filler in them.
What he is making now
Joki calls his style Gothic, Baroque, surreal-inspired with a bit of pop and social realism, rendered in horror vacui. That last phrase is the whole key. Horror vacui means fear of empty space, and it is why his compositions crawl to the edge of the paper and keep going. There is nowhere to rest. You are meant to be a little overwhelmed.
Caravaggio and Rembrandt for the light. Bosch for the moral chaos. Giger for the machinery fused to flesh. Then Poe and Lovecraft sitting underneath it.
Calling it dark art undersells him badly, and this is what people miss. Look at the titles. Take it easy, life aint dat bad. everything doesnt have to have meaning. embracing JOMO. i speak flowers. let he who can draw, prompt the first word. He writes "heART" instead of heart because he cannot help himself. The imagery is monstrous and the intent is tender.
He takes surveillance, social media, legacy media, burnout, faith and grief, runs them through a Baroque meat grinder, and hands you back something funny and generous. He has had hard stretches and he draws them instead of hiding them. Watching someone turn their worst weeks into work that makes other people feel less alone is the highest use of this medium I can think of.
Why 172 times
Because he is consistent the way only obsessives are. I collect most artists once. I collect Joki over and over because every drop is unmistakably his and none of them are the same drawing twice.
Give the Joki Works gallery ten minutes. One hundred seventy-two pieces in one place. Let the density do its work.
And Joki, if you are reading this: one of the ballpoint originals has my name on it. Name your price. I have been patient for three years and I am running out of patience.
Find JoKiArGu: X · Instagram · objkt · Foundation · SuperRare · Prints · All links
In the collection: JoKiArGu on Chaz.Art · 172 works across Tezos, Solana and Base