Simone Pompei is a digital artist who works across generative pixel art, matte painting and 3D-printed product design.,,,His practice traces back to a character named Hilly, a simple line-drawn rabbit he first created around 2000, which he later revived as a generative pixel-art NFT collection.In the Winter Echoes collection, minted on Tezos in 2023, he pairs old-photograph textures with embedded text to evoke fragments of memory.
Pompei began experimenting with matte painting in 2013, blending photography and 3D renders after attending a workshop led by Pedro Fernandes at the Creative ProShow event.,Around the same period he designed small 3D-printable objects, including bookends and a series of jars, shared through Thingiverse, and sold prints of his work through Fine Art America.,
Returning to Hilly for his NFT work, he recreated the character as Hilly, a set of 100 generative pixel-art pieces coded first in Processing and then in Python, each combining three traits and a background color with its own rarity. Each piece was minted individually on OpenSea, a manual process he hoped to eventually replace with a smart contract.Winter Echoes followed in 2023 as a five-piece Tezos collection released on objkt.com, each work built around muted, old-photograph tones, sparse color strokes standing in for the selectivity of memory, and text merged directly into the image rather than captioning it.
