batz, also known as batzdu, is a digital artist whose work embeds internet memes—especially the Pepe character—within the visual grammar of twentieth century modernism. Working under a practice he calls Modern Memeism, he reconfigures the fractured planes of Cubism, the dynamism of Futurism and the grid-based abstraction of Piet Mondrian to stage what he terms the memeplex.
His earliest documented work, GeoMetric Pepe #52 from the series GeoMetric Pepes, was minted in September 2022 and embeds the Pepe meme within a rigid Neoplasticist grid that references Piet Mondrian. In Curiosity, minted in March 2023, he drew on Cubism's fractured perspective to render a deconstructed human form of interlocking hands, limbs and a mask-like face. Pepedenza #2, minted in January 2023 as an edition of ten, disassembles national colors and iconography into curved, shifting fragments that recall the dynamism of Italian Futurism. Meme #96, from 2024, distorts Piet Mondrian's grid into a chaotic field of glitching, pixelated blocks that invoke the visual language of compression artifacts.
