Raphaël de Courville, known as Sableraph, is a generative artist who has been coding art for more than a decade, working across on-chain generative collections and standalone digital pieces. His process favours what he calls the unguided serendipity of creative coding: he begins from a rough idea without a preconceived visual outcome and lets the code's own behaviour shape the result.
Long before NFTs, de Courville explored how digital art's value could be determined: in the early 2010s he made Pricetag, a physical artwork that displayed its own price. In 2015 he attended a hackathon run by the Berlin blockchain-art startup Ascribe, where he devised, and won with, a concept for editions and artist royalties that resembled what NFTs would later become. He first heard about crypto art's environmental concerns from Memo Akten, Kyle McDonald and Joanie Lemercier and decided to wait for alternatives. Lemercier told him about Hic et Nunc shortly before it launched in March 2021, and de Courville minted his first piece there soon after. He calls that first weekend transformative: it was the first time in more than a decade of making generative art that he earned significant income from it.
In December 2021 he released 0.20 carat on fxhash, a collection of generative gems and his most ambitious project to that point, completed in a month and dedicated to his mother, whose lifelong passion for precious stones shaped his aesthetic sensibility and led him to become an artist. He followed it with a series of Carat collaborations, each made jointly with a different generative artist. In a related piece, Adam, he released 10,000 editions that each erase a portion of a passage from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, so the text disappears as collectors acquire the work.
His 2021 Hic et Nunc piece eARs of Gold has been cited as an example of the platform's early community output.Right Click Save named him, alongside artists including Ben Kovach, Ahmad Moussa, Robert Hodgin and Tyler Hobbs, among generative artists whose documentation of their creative process is especially thorough.In December 2025 he took part in Jenni Pasanen's Advent Collaboration, a 24-day digital advent calendar in which Pasanen released a daily one-of-one artwork with a different guest artist, minted through Transient Labs.
