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Tim de Vries: all secrets on the table

At an afterparty, Tim de Vries had an inspiration: he saw a table with pills, coke and cigarette butts and decided to cast that scene in epoxy. By now he has sold a few hundred and can call himself a successful artist. The next step is to release a series of NFTs. "Thanks to the new technology, we are becoming a little Google ourselves," he says.

What was your childhood like?

"I was born in 1980 in the Achterhoek and, after a lot of moving, ended up in Hummelo, the birthplace of the rock band Normaal, where I lived until I was 11. When my mother got a new boyfriend, we ended up in Warnsveld, near Zutphen."

You escaped your environment by seeking the nightlife. Your website says you had your "fair share of sex, drugs and house music. Tell.

"From a young age, I was totally a house fan. I bought my first Turn Up the Bass tapes when I was eight. With my headphones on I sat at home listening to them. So cool! When I entered my first club, I knew: this is it! That was in the Pacha in Ibiza. My father took me there when I was fourteen. Ibiza was our second home, we went there every summer. But in Warnsveld my friends and I were totally bored out of our minds. So we went - hup! - into the car and off to Amsterdam. We mainly went to the Hemkade, really such a banging place where a lot of trance and techno parties were organized."

Didn't all that going out affect your school performance?

"Until the third grade, learning came easily to me. Until I discovered partying; then it didn't come naturally. I started fooling around too much and learning too little. School really became a chore. I enjoyed it very much, but I hated learning. And I also felt I wasn't learning anything. Mashing out rows from a book: what good would that do? School didn't suit me. Why not do something I like? With difficulty I finished high school. That caused me a lot of stress, because my parents thought I would effortlessly pass the vwo and then go to college."

But you studied at the Amsterdam Business School, right?

"I started that study because it was the way to go. Still that pressure. But all the time I was thinking: why am I doing this anyway? I didn't finish it and went to Ibiza to work in real estate. Bit of selling houses, I could get commission on that. I worked in Amsterdam in the hospitality industry, had a number of businesses... But it was never that I thought 'this is what I want'."

So how did you become an artist?

"I've always had a thing for art and had been messing around with epoxy out of hobbyism for a long time. At an after-party at someone's house, I saw a table full of 'party favors'. Suddenly I had the inspiration: I have to cast that scene in epoxy. So I did: a table full of pills, lines of coke, bills, cannabis bags... I thought it was very cool, but I didn't know what others would think. Maybe they thought I was a junkie or someone with weird ideas. I had this Wasted Table, as I call it, at home and all my friends thought it was super cool. At one point, someone asked if I wanted to sell it too. Yeah, why not? I mentioned an amount and he immediately said 'that's good, deal'. So I should have asked more for it. Then I cast five to take to Ibiza and I showed them to the owner of a very cool store there. He said, 'Make five more right away, because I'll sell the first batch to my regular customers anyway.' And so it was: within a week he had sold them. That man made me big there. I visited the most beautiful villas with the most extravagant people, including a billionaire who wanted to put one of my tables in each of his eight bathrooms. This man had very wealthy friends in London, to whom he introduced me. Then I was picked up by a driver and everyone wanted one of those tables. It was unstoppable."

What do you want to communicate with this art?

"I want to discuss taboos with it and try to break them. Take that table with drugs. What is the illegality of it? What is allowed and what is secret? I see it as conversation pieces. Two older people bought such a table to make these things discussable for their grandchildren. The more drugs are talked about, the more the tension is removed, the less they are used. I think. In my youth I was only told 'can't' and 'isn't good for you', so I started doing it. That Femke Halsema wants to legalize cocaine, I applaud enormously."

Speaking of cocaine, how do you manage to pour powder in such a way that it doesn't become a mush?

"I studied and experimented with that for a very long time until it finally worked. But that's the blacksmith's secret. I also tried pouring beer in and then that didn't work again. It's a lot of tinkering before something works."

 

 

Will you get your tables of illegal objects across the border?

"Well, I wouldn't risk taking a table like that with drugs, weapons, money and passports to, say, the Middle East. To be clear: it's not real what's in there, it's all fake. But before it is shipped, I often have to prove that. I also cast other items in epoxy, often on commission. For example, I have cast a poker table and a Wolf of Wall Street table, and it also happens that someone comes to me with a drawer full of old memories. There always has to be a story in it, for example by making a piece of life visible. I am now working on a triptych for Alvin Leung, the chef of three-star restaurant Bo Innovation** in Hong Kong. His nickname is The Devil Chef and he calls his cooking style X-Treme Chinese, with one of his high-profile dishes being Sex on the Beach: an edible condom on a beach made of mushrooms. A colorful figure, who was also a judge on MasterChef Canada. The cases come to hang in his restaurant, also known as the "elBullí of the East. In the 1960s, Alvin went to Canada with nothing, which is what the first suitcase is about. The second focuses on the start of his successful career in Hong Kong, where he began to make substantial money. The third suitcase, finally, is very fraught: it deals with the impending subjugation of Hong Kong to the Chinese dictatorship. Alvin has sent me all kinds of objects, including a sticker that says "Free Hong Kong. I am very anti-censorship, make transparent in my art what is being kept quiet. But I have to cover the word 'liberated' on that sticker, otherwise he risks being thrown in the bin."

How many Wasted Tables have you made by now?

"A few hundred, in the standard size 28x50x60 centimeters. It's all handwork and the production process takes about three, four months. But I can make several at a time. Epoxy is very expensive. So a lot of money and time goes into a table. And very often things go wrong: a butch, a scratch, and sometimes all of a sudden there's a fly in the epoxy. Hence it is quite pricey art: a table costs six to seven thousand euros."

 

How did you get through corona time?

"I thought: that's not going to be anything at all. But during that time I exploded on social media. That was because the whole party scene was at a standstill - there was no content. I had made a video of my Hangover Table that was shared first by radio deejay Bram Krikke and then by a major techno site. That video was viewed millions of times. For weeks I was bombarded with as many as five hundred messages a day, every day I gained thousands of followers. Really disturbed."

It didn't stop at tables; you also started making cases.

"Also made of epoxy, but combined with aluminum and bronze. In The Case are objects that are normally in closed cases. Like the tables, the cases show secrets from our lives. For example, one is full of bitcoins and another is full of passports, a gun, dollar bills, credit cards... Reminiscent of James Bond movies. I like to be inspired by old movies and series, by what I used to think was cool. So I made a gold gun, Tim Blaster Bronze, which brings together my love of James Bond and the Nintendo game Duck Hunt. The Globe Award, in turn, is a combination between a Golden Globe, an Emmy, the statue The World is Yours from the movie Scarface and the FIFA World Cup. It's sort of my own Oscar. Funny how an object brings status and happiness. While we it's also all a bit rubbish - it's created. And I'm a big Star Wars fan, which explains why I made my own lightsaber, Tim Saber. So I tinker with ideas from my childhood, which is the main source I draw from."

What do you think about the development of NFTs?

"Great. The beauty of the underlying technology is that you can have online ownership. Now only companies like Google have that. Thanks to the new technology, we become a little Google ourselves, everyone gets a piece of the pie. Everything I put on Instagram is no longer mine. That's very crooked and this will straighten it out."

When will you come up with your first NFT?

"The idea is already there: from one of my suitcases I'm going to make an NFT. But I'm waiting a little longer, because trading in NFTs has dropped 99 percent. This is mainly because the volume of money circulating in that market has decreased due to the decline of crypto. NFTs offer me tremendous opportunities. Digitally, I can pour in anything, because then I'm not working with epoxy but with bits and bytes. We are mostly fine-tuning the story now, a cinematic story. I'm thinking of releasing, as a first series, three thousand NFTs for a price of three hundred euros, all unique digital cases with slightly different contents. With an NFT you not only own such a digital case, you buy into my community at the same time. Then, among other things, you can have a say in my future art projects, because the NFT holders can come up with input along the lines of "we want you to make a rocket. I also want to involve my physical art, for example, by raffling off some suitcases among the NFT owners. For a lot of people, such a suitcase is too expensive - it has a price tag of 18,500 euros - and with an NFT you still have a chance to get such an artwork in your possession. It is also possible that your digital suitcase contains one of my artworks, such as The Brick Phone. In that case, you will also receive that as a physical gift. And so we will do many more things: throw parties in Ibiza, organize fun things, you name it."

MASTERS MAGAZINE

Curious about the rest of the interview? The winter issue of MASTERS was created in collaboration with Jordi van den Bussche. Many will know him as YouTuber Kwebbelkop, yet he has been working hard as an entrepreneur for some time, as he reveals in the Big Interview. What's new is that his company JVDB Studios is offering to do social media marketing and short-format content marketing for other companies. "They can also go and figure it out themselves, but we cracked the code." Jordi gives a stage to like-minded entrepreneurs such as Jay-Jay Boske, Demy de Zeeuw, Chahid Charrak and Marcella de Bie, and discusses developments around games, crypto and NFT: "Just as bitcoin turned the financial system upside down, the same will happen with gaming." This extra-thick winter issue also features Lengers' first own ship, an interview with Corendon chief Atilay Uslu, specials on the new BMW 7 Series and Samsung foldables, and - exclusively for MASTERS! - an interview with Max Verstappen.

MASTERS #52 with guest editor Jordi van den Bussche