An Improbable Thread: In Conversation with Gozo, @graceb_art, and Artie Handz

The following transcript is from a conversation held over Twitter, hosted by Artie Galerie's Artie Handz and collector @graceb_art, ahead of gozo's release of an improbable thread, presented by SOLOS and Artie Galerie. Portions of this interview were conducted in Spanish and translated with the assistance of AI. There may therefore be minor discrepancies between the original phrasing and the English rendering presented here.

Artie Handz:  Hello, welcome everyone, thank you for joining us. I'm super excited for this conversation. I’m super excited to, along with SOLOS, exhibit this wonderful show an improbable thread by gozo.

Thank you so much for being here to listen to us chat about this a little bit. Gozo is a Spanish artist, and while his English is probably better than he lets on, he doesn’t feel completely comfortable speaking it, so we have the wonderful Grace here to act as a Spanish conversationalist. My high-school Spanish wouldn’t hold up, unfortunately, so they’ll handle most of the conversation. I’ll chime in here and there when I can.

Before I hand it over to Grace and gozo, I’d like to read the exhibition statement:

Artie Galerie and SOLOS are proud to present an improbable thread by gozo. In this series the artist explores meaning in the unstable, the fragmentary, and the imperfect. Rather than striving for polish, gozo transforms memory into mythology. 

Working with the unstable outputs of early AI, he treats these images as raw matter, like clay to be cut, layered, and reshaped. What others might discard as error, he gathers as material. The result is compositions that resist finality: precarious, trembling, always on the verge of collapse yet refusing to disappear. 

In this tension, the digital medium itself, with its errors, limits, and textures, becomes part of the work’s material truth. Glitches hold their ground, artifacts breathe, pixels refuse silence. Nothing holds for long. Everything insists on returning. 

This repetition breeds symbol. Symbol resists erasure. 

Within their endless reruns, these images remind us that myth is not fixed but woven from fragments. Each piece seeks not perfection but connection, an improbable thread binding what should not bind, holding what refuses to be held.

This is the second series I’ve done with gozo. What initially drew me to his work was this feeling of the endless rerun, the GIFs that loop forever, yet never feel repetitive. If you keep watching, they shift. Tiny, unique movements and moments reveal themselves. You get lost in them.

That’s why I chose the song Untitled #3 by Sigur Rós to accompany the exhibition. It’s the song I listen to when I need to ground myself and feel fully present. These artworks provide a similar feeling. Many of the GIFs are just 2.9 seconds long, repeating endlessly. And yet you can get lost in those 2.9 seconds for minutes, even hours. With that, I’ll hand it over to Grace to continue the conversation with gozo. 

@graceb_art: Let’s start with the first question: why 'gozo'?

gozo:  Hi, thanks for having me here. The name, I’d say it's a part of me. It started when I returned to art and started publishing on the blockchain. "Gozo" in Spanish is used as enjoyment. Although it almost means sexual or spiritual pleasure, it seemed like a good name to start with. Something that stems from genuine things, not cool things.

@graceb_art: Would you share a little about your upbringing, your family, education, and any juicy things you may want to tell us.

gozo: Well, I'm a great fan of art, but I was always searching for those moments when I was younger, not discovering them. I remember the first art I discovered was the covers of the books I found at the newsstands. Almost all of them were surrealist covers of cheap Agatha Christie novels.

@graceb_art: Can you share who raised you and, give us some context?

gozo: I was raised by my mother and my aunt. Basically, we were a somewhat humble family. We lived with my grandparents. And well, I painted a lot; I never stopped painting. And well, I remember it was a happy environment, but I was never very motivated by art. So, I developed it later.

@graceb_art: So let's segue from there to your professional career before becoming an artist. What were you doing and how did you have an exposure, if any, to art and creativity?

gozo: I left school pretty early. I wasn't very good at it. I got into trouble. But when I turned 20, I started trying my hand at training a bit more. Not my interests. I studied photography but soon after, I switched to graphic design and development, which was a bit more in line with the experimentation I wanted to find. And since then, I've even been working as a graphic designer and developer.

@graceb_art: So what happened then in 2021 that got you started in crypto art? 

 gozo: I remember an artist friend told me about the work, basically, with culture and painting. And he was working on several great PFP projects, well, he was doing work that wasn't included. They didn't put it in the credits, but he showed it to me, and I was very interested because something I had been somewhat discarding, not my art practice, because it frustrated me, was something I found interesting means of distribution.

I didn't have feedback from other artists. And I started doing a lot of research, discovering platforms that were, at that time, very, very popular. And I said, this is the place. If I really want to focus on something, I think this would be the way to get in there a little. I started working hard, and to this day, here we are.

@graceb_art: How much was this impacted by the opportunity to make money (be honest) versus practicing art at that time?

gozo: I think it was 50/50 because it was obviously a lot of money, especially with the absurd figures being handled at the time. It wasn't like something others had suddenly faded into the background, a hobby at the time, as it was for me. My life was absorbed by work, family, and so on. Suddenly, you start to think, is this thing I've been doing for a long time or what I've been doing here? Is there a way to make a good living with them? So, I'd say it's a 50/50. Obviously, it was very lucrative to be able to make a lot of money with them.

Artie Handz: In truth it was more money than anything for everyone in 2021. We'll be honest here. I'll admit to the same for sure. 

@graceb_art: Why did you start with 3D? 

gozo: I started with 3D not because it was the easiest but because it was something I'd never done before. I'd been messing around a lot with Unity for facility development, interactive things, but I'd never really modelled before, and my goal was to model very simple things, very basic shapes, but I had to learn how to do it. The interesting thing about working with Unity was like starting from scratch, like forgetting everything I'd learned and starting with a cool new tool.

@graceb_art: Do you remember the first sales and maybe the price and who helped you?

gozo: The first piece that I minted, well, I burned that one because it was hideous. There are people who have located it and seen it. But anyway, it's a secret. Then my first ‘official’ piece, I gave it away. I mean, back then, people would get it for nothing, that's the first piece for sale. That was kind of what started the d series, which then evolved quite a bit during compliments. I remember the first collector who bought it, who's a Brazilian artist. If I'm not mistaken, his name is Curio Fringe. Then I was also collected by hAyDiRoKeT and Ilan Katin, who were super important in those early days because, well, apart from the fact that I met them, I spoke with them, they gave me a lot of encouragement, they pushed me and they were really the people who got me moving a bit. 

Artie Handz: So real quick, I’m looking at your second piece, the first ‘official’ piece that you sold right now. ‘Sigilo Nº1’, 25 editions Sold for 1XTZ a piece. Of course XTZ was like $6 then. So that's like more like 10XTZ now.

The early buyers like Curio Fringe, Ina Vare, Ilan Katin, hAyDiRoKeT, they are all still here with us. 

@graceb_art: What was your process from then 2021 into, let's say today before an improbable thread? And what was the inflection point that helped you grow the most? 

gozo: Before, when I started making pieces, I always had a very clear idea. I'd just slap it on and carry it out. There were some changes, but the weird thing was, I mean, I kept with the same idea until it came out the way I wanted. But well, as I became interested in artificial intelligence, I wasn't really interested in getting perfect images, but rather as part of the process. And a couple of years ago, I had a very strong turning point.

A couple of years ago, I had a really deep depression. Well, I realized it had been brewing underground for many years, and that it made me think about a lot of things. I really enjoyed art, but I didn't enjoy the process of creating it. I enjoyed my work, and well, it's very complicated with this whole process, right? Because I'm very obsessive. The mental image I had was the one I wanted to achieve and it had to be accomplished to perfection. I would just bang my head. 

@graceb_art: What was your process to start getting out of the depression and into making art again? 

gozo: I started with a psychoanalyst, a therapist. That object of enjoyment never arrived, so then I began to look for a process in which I could let myself go. I wouldn't have to make the decisions, and that was kind of the seed of the idea of ​​using artificial intelligence. But since I didn't want artificial intelligence to make the images for me, what I was looking for was things that were as diffuse as possible, something in which I unconsciously, as if it were automatic writing, would begin to see images, textures, shapes, and from there, without taking it seriously at all. 

It was a practice I did every morning. I would get up, write several very vague prompts. Then, with 100 images, I would look at them and start cutting out parts that interested me. That whole process has become quite sophisticated, but at the beginning it was like that. 

And from there on, based on those mistakes, those connections I made, an image was created that perhaps wasn't one I would publish at first, but it was a way of unconsciously constructing something that was very enjoyable.

@graceb_art: What does your current process involve?

gozo: Well, generally, I start with an idea or concept I want to work on. I write a series of sentences related to that concept, and start to do the prompts, right? I do go into detail. For example, what color I would like to eliminate, what colors would I like to appear? It's not very defined, but yes, some vague guidelines, and maybe the material I want to appear, be it metal or earth. 

When I gather enough material from all that, I make a selection of images. I have a local installation of Stable Diffusion. I use basic models from Stable Diffusion, nothing very fancy.

For the collage, nothing is very simple. I put together a bunch of images and start looking at parts, if it starts cropping them. And then I paste them all into a single file. And generally, there's always a specific shape, a color that marks the beginning of everything, and everything starts to come together from that. Putting together a piece can take me hours, or sometimes it can take days. Those connections are slower, but little by little I organize the image. 

At first, I used many images for a single piece over time. And I'm refining this process a little, and I'm using less intent, less accumulation. And when I finish the entire composition part, I already have a composition that I'm more or less happy with. 

Artie Handz:  I want to step in real quick and about the timeline of these new tricks. I'm asking because to me the piece that the first piece you released with this new structure that adds this, you know, crazy amount of texture along with the movement, you had other pieces before that were GIFs and had the same kind of movement and repetitive nature, but didn't have that same texturing that happens in ‘backwards’, which was released just about a year ago. That work seems to be a marked departure in terms of your use of texture.

gozo: Yes, with this process, I had many pieces of this style unpublished for a few months. The first one that clicked for me was a fairly abstract piece, even very imperfect. Suddenly, I saw it, that everything fit together, that combination of textures and colors that evoked a landscape, but at the same time, it was a pure extraction. That's when I said yes, this is really it, huh? 

Everything I've been processing these past few months, was to get to this piece. Interestingly, it's a piece that took me very little time to make. I made it in one and a half hours after making pieces over weeks that never saw the light of day. And that one, as soon as I saw it, I said, this is it, and I published it that day.

@graceb_art: But it's not odd because obviously when we are in the zone, we don't need that much time to achieve great things. 

AH: Yeah. It’s still my favorite piece I think. I mean, that was when I discovered gozo, you know, and knew this was something special. And then over the next five or six, seven pieces created, that's when I realized I needed to contact him.

He released probably seven or eight pieces over those next two months. And then I reached out, just really interested in working with him. I was trying to, at that time, expand into showing more artists.

You know, I’ve collected 3,600 pieces on Tezos, and to me his work was a no-brainer. These have a certain magic to them that just no one else is replicating. And that's the issue we keep having. When I talk to Jamie or Layla, we keep asking, how do we verbalize this? It's just, there's some type of alchemy to it. 

@graceb_art: Yes, gozo your craft has a very strong identity and presence, an alchemy as Artie mentioned. When we see a piece of yours, of course we can identify it as yours. What do you think defines your identity? You shared in the interview that you have this constant obsession and intrusive, recurring thoughts from all your life. And that's when you craft your work. Can you share more?

gozo: Almost always, the pieces start from internal images, or internal thoughts, or certain situations. It's hard for me to say today I'm going to do a piece about flowers. The driving force doesn't always come from something specific, it’s a little more internal, and mental images are generally always a bit illusory. They're a bit between what I’ve seen and what's out of focus. I think that's why this process came to me too. I mean, when I think of an image or an idea, I don't usually see it in its entirety; it eludes me. It stays in this kind of fog. So I find it very suggestive, and it's a bit of the driving force behind what makes me work.

@graceb_art: With that, let's get to an improbable thread, let's discuss the show. 

gozo: Well, the starting point for this series isn't just vague images; they're images that I've had over the years that constantly recur. These images mutate, blending with each other depending on the situation, but they're like mental flashes that pop up from time to time. They appear in moments as varied and absurd as shopping, going to the dentist, or having sex.

I already thought the idea of ​​using these starting points, vivid images, to see how far they reached me, and repeating these images from different perspectives to find a common thread that I could see through them, because certain images kept recurring in my mind at certain moments, was fun and interesting. 

So the collection that emerged is very curious to me because life was basically complete, and some images are more literal than others regarding the starting points. 

I do see certain constants between some images and others. And you can see the common thread between some of them, but not all of them. It's good to leave something for mystery.

Artie Handz: Yeah, they’re fantastic, despite my inability to speak coherently about them, they're amazing. 

@graceb_art: I think not being able to speak about them or describe them is what makes them even better. You know what I think guys, I think art is its own language and explaining it just defeats the purpose. And I think it's especially a sign of good art when you are, you know, hopelessly drawn to it, but you can’t really explain why.

Artie Handz: I wholeheartedly agree. The texture and the movement, especially on a larger screen, you know, the bigger the pixels get, the way they move becomes even more of a dance.

gozo: I like that you comment on this because people tell me they don't know how to explain what I do. They simply find it beautiful and at the same time, it seems a little unsettling. It's really a goal for me, it's a goal accomplished. 

I mean, I love standing in front of a work of art and not being able to understand it, and instead connecting in some way and feeling drawn to it without knowing what it means or being able to explain it.

@graceb_art: Gozo, it has been a pleasure getting to know you.

gozo: Yes, it's been a pleasure doing it with you. Nice to meet you. Thank you.

Artie Handz: Grace, thank you so much for leading this and obviously gozo thank you for everything, for working together again, it's always a pleasure. The works, they’re outstanding. So thank you, for making work that is so incredible and that people can enjoy.