Zancan is a generative and plotter artist based in Bordeaux, France, who renders natural forms — gardens, forests, fallen ruins — through code, describing his own style as “figurative generative art”.,A former oil painterand self-taught coder since his teens, he worked briefly as an electronics engineer before turning to painting and later to generative art after discovering NFTs in March 2021.
As a teenager he coded in assembler for the Atari demoscene, and he later earned an engineering degree in electronics, working in that field for a year before switching to painting. He then co-founded a development studio with a friend, making real-time visuals and interactive installations for museums, before returning to drawing after a six-year break. He learned about NFTs after hearing a colleague discuss Beeple's The First 5000 Days sale in March 2021, and made his first NFT, The Oak Tree, an 18-part piece on Foundation whose PNG output led him to the vector-line, transparent-wash style for which he later became known.
He developed his generative practice on fxhash's open, uncurated minting model, alongside the artist William Mapan.His fxhash release Garden, Monoliths (2021) depicts ambiguous felled stone structures overtaken by dense foliage, often generated using L-systems, the recursive algorithms that model how plants grow.,Zancan has called the collection “a turning point” that drew collectors who had previously bought only on Ethereum onto fx(hash) and, in his words, “launched my work to another level”.Around the same time he released Lushtemples (2021), a plotter drawing series of felled stone ruins overtaken by foliage on Objkt.com.The accessible, lush realism of his work has been credited with helping draw a wider audience of collectors into generative art.
His ruin imagery has been compared to that of the 16th-century printmaker Hieronymus Cock, whose engravings of overgrown Roman ruins prefigure his own.Zancan also cites the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in whose paintings nature prevails, and recalls being struck by a teenage visit to the Louvre.In 2022 he collaborated with the artist Yazid on (kinder)Garden, Monuments, and later released the long-form collection A Bugged Forest.
His work has been exhibited in New York, London and Valencia, and he took part in PROOF's Grails Season 2 with the piece The Fabric of Trees.fxhash's December 2024 token-airdrop calculations credited him with $2 million in cumulative revenue on the platform.During Kate Vass Galerie's Node to Node art salon in Paris in October 2023, he gave live plotter drawing performances, creating drawings together with visitors.,
