THE PRINT
30 x 20 inches, drawn at 18,000 pixels across, which is 600 pixels per inch at this size. The detail holds closer than your eye can resolve from across the room. This one has to be walked up to.
Limited edition of 10, signed and numbered, on Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm.
It ships rolled around the outside of a rigid core, wrapped in Kraft paper and layers of bubble wrap, then boxed with foam protection. If you want a specific edition number, email me before you check out. First asked, first held.
Each includes a certificate of authenticity timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via Verisart.
Bitcoin accepted at checkout.
THE CONCEPT
Fiat is Latin for let it be done. A decree, issued once, with nobody asked. Palea is chaff: the dry husk around a grain of wheat, the part of the harvest nobody can eat.
Separating the two has never needed an authority. You throw the threshed harvest into the wind. The grain is heavy and drops back to the floor, the chaff is light and blows off, and whatever's left gets swept up and burned. Wind, weight and fire, and nobody votes on any of them. Wheat is wheat because of what it weighs.
Fiat Palea. Let there be chaff. Skip the test, count the chaff as the harvest, then print it, heap it on a wagon and call the heap wealth.
It's built on Bosch's Haywain Triptych and the Flemish proverb behind it: the world is a haywain, and each man takes what he can. Bosch painted the whole of society scrambling over a wagon of hay while the pope and the emperor ride behind it in no hurry at all. The grain was never on that wagon. In mine, the stalks are printed.
Mine is one panel, read left to right the way his three are, following the harvest from one end of the farm to the other. The garden on the left is where the money is counted, with BITCOIN on the tower and BETTER MONEY on the dome. Up the hill, an empty vault is lettered EX NIHILO, and the plaque outside it reads GOLD WINDOW CLOSED. Above the vault, a printer with NO LIMIT down its arm fills the wagon, and the scale chained to that arm shows a heap of bills still riding high against a few gold coins. Behind the wagon, a crowned skull on horseback carries the sign himself: LET THERE BE CHAFF.
In the middle of the crowd stands a fanning mill lettered SEPARATOR. It throws the bills off into a pit and leaves real grain on the ground, and nobody's fighting over the grain. At the far end there's a furnace with two mouths. The left one holds gold behind steel bars under a sign that reads YIELD, and the right one is full of burning bills under a sign that reads CHAFF ONLY. Gold comes out of a fire as gold.
The mask is on the pile, too. The man knee-deep in the bills wears it, and so does the climber on the ladder. Knowing what the money is has never stopped anybody from reaching for it.
Some of the words read from across the room, like EX NIHILO over the vault and 6102 on the crate. Others only show up once you're close enough to fog the glass: CUSTODY on a key tag smaller than a fingernail, NO REDEMPTION on a window nobody's opened since 1971. Every one of them is a choice you can see. Crafted, not generated.
The full walkthrough, object by object, is in the Fiat Palea essay.
Throw it in the air and see what comes down.
TEN DECREES
Ten of the most crowded and most furious paintings Bosch and Bruegel ever made, redrawn for the fiat age. One every two weeks, from August 29th to January 3rd, the Genesis Block anniversary. Nine of the titles are orders. The last one is ours. Better money, better world.
