At a gallery solo show opening some time in 2019, showcasing photos of people’s bodies that he painted, Paul Roustan was reluctantly caught in a dialogue irrelevant to the moment at hand. He took off his glasses, closed them and hung them on his button up shirt. This was a secret signal to any of his crew in the gallery to come rescue him from this conversation. “There are times where people want to spark up a conversation and it veers off into something that is not about the artwork.” Roustan explained about the encounter.
In the physical world an opening lasts around three hours. “You can only talk to so many people at one time,” he said. “My job is to try to start selling while I’m there.” A very different scene played out at his first art opening in Decentraland in early March, 2021. It was at Cromulon’s Gallery and “Cromulon” took care of everything. “It blew my mind.” Roustan described what it was like. “I’m seeing my NFT artwork for the first time on virtual 15 foot screens with neon wrapped around it. I’ve done countless gallery shows in real life and I know what it takes to put up a show.” Getting something like that in the physical world would cost tens of thousands of dollars. By his calculation an artist would need to charge three times that for the art piece.
“At Cromulon’s opening ‘TheParty’, the user who onboarded me into DCL, DM’d me: ‘Hey, there’s a collector in the gallery that wants to ask you some questions. Talk to him. Now.’ He’s asking me the usual questions I get in a normal gallery opening. As I’m answering them I realized everybody could see our conversation in the chat. To me that was the biggest epiphany, gamechanger.” Roustan realized that he only had to answer the questions once instead of 70 times.
It was for that gallery opening that Roustan first met a number of Decentraland “OGs” like Youmack, Zoo, Endo, PB, and Cat5. People were there from all over the world. It was much more convenient than a gallery show in the physical world. “I didn’t have to pay $3k to set it up. I didn’t have to leave my house.” He began to think that the traditional gallery would soon be obsolete.
He came into the space a skeptic but had an overwhelmingly positive first experience. “I knew that Decentraland has some serious potential.” He left and didn’t return to Decentraland until seven months later when he had saved up enough money to make his next big step. “I was working really hard on collecting collectors in the NFT space.” Roustan said. He talked about creating a brand with his NFTs. He sold reasonably priced NFTs on the Tezos platform.
“I’d drop one NFT and sell it to a hundred people which meant I collected a hundred collectors that I can now nurture and build relationships with.” It was through these relationships that he eventually sold one of one NFTs for one ETH. He toyed with the idea of opening a physical gallery that showed virtual art. “My over analytical brain was like, ‘You gotta pay rent and deal with a landlord. Guests could destroy the bathroom. Weather damage.’ You have to deal with problems.” Then he remembered his show in Decentraland and he saw those headaches fade away.
With the money he saved up from his web3 earnings he bought a one by one parcel inside the first letter “N” of the Decentraland sign on the map. It was twice what he planned to spend but he believed it was worth it. On October 28, 2021 he hosted his own gallery grand opening there. He hacked apart the Mario house that came with the estate and formed it into the nightclub we know as “Casa Roustan”.
For comparison, Roustan told me his most successful show at a physical gallery had about 500 people show up. Video footage from that party played on virtual screens at his Decentraland gallery show where 540 people claimed a POAP, with around 1800 attendees the first 3 days. “Literally two or three hours before the show opened, Facebook announced the change to Meta. Overnight my land shot up to ten times what I paid for it. I thought, ‘I could sell this right now for $100k. But I’m not doing it.’”
You might be thinking he’s very lucky. It’s no mistake that Roustan is often in the right place at the right time when it comes to web3. He has intentionally put himself in situations that appear to not make any sense. “I’ve been body painting for almost 18 years,” he said. “There’s no high school counselor who will say, ‘You can become a body painter.’ The whole world is telling me you can’t do that. I don’t care. I will find a way. All I care about is getting better at this thing I’m obsessed with. I’m not gonna stop. I don’t want to sit in a cubicle. Those 18 years have enabled me to think outside the box very easily.”
He said that he has conditioned his mind to accept the gifts of inspiration that come to him. “I am like a vessel for this energy to flow out of me. It is a hard place to get to.” An element of play is also an important ingredient. The body painting sessions are collaborations with the model who is also his canvas. He cites “Astro Gal” and “Shark Tub” as prime examples of successful creations made during these sorts of co-creative sessions.
It wasn’t an easy road to get where he is now. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were constantly taking down his photos of bodypaint. Based on his previous experience with corporate social media platforms, Roustan had wondered, “How long would I be allowed to be in here(Decentraland) before I get shut down?” It was a concern that was permanently put to rest when the “Roustan Gallery” located at 37,-114 got its POI(Point of Interest) star with over 200 yes votes.
While most might be afraid to dive into a career as a professional body paint artist, he said he is numb to facing his fears. “I walked that fire a long time ago. I’ve shut down those voices that say, ‘You can’t do that.’” Instead of holding himself back he embraced his creative side and leaned into it. “It is absolutely fulfilling and amazing. To start producing things that come out of nowhere.”
He said this approach enables him to recognize trends and capitalize on them. All of his four mythic wearable collections are sold out. Four of his six legendary wearable collections are sold out. He is also sold out of his two legendary emotes and his mythic emote. A wearable is a piece of digital fashion like a necklace or a skirt. An emote is a ten second animated clip that your avatar can perform on command.
The “OG Hover” emote is a good example of his ability to spot an opportunity and then creatively exploit it. “I remember being at Dollhouse in the middle of October when Shelley told me, ‘You’re hovering!’ It was a weird glitch that was happening. It was totally random because hovering had been gone for months. I remember when it went away being kind of bummed because I liked it.” The hover was a “glitch” that people came to like as an alternative to standing around when they would go AFK(Away From Keyboard) with their avatar. “When I have an idea and it clicks and I know it will work, it almost 100% does work.” One day it clicked for him to bring back the hover. He called it the “OG Hover” knowing that any new visitor to Decentraland would not understand why anyone would pay money for that emote. But that was the goal. “I wanted it for the people that recognized what it was.” He must have known something about his market because 100 editions of the emote were sold out in two months.
“I never said, ‘Someday I’m going to make a wearable.’ I immediately started trying to figure it out.” He struggled through making a t-shirt but never released it. “The bigger picture was the “body paint” wearable.” He is convinced that that piece of digital fashion wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t first dove into designing a t-shirt. “Do it now because time moves so fast in this space. You might lose your passion. If you wait, it does more harm than good. If you do it now it will inspire something else.”
In Decentraland he gained inspiration by noticing what other people noticed. He saw how everyone at Dollhouse liked to go to the very top. He decided to make a very high place for people to go in his chill out spot, the Cove. The Cove scene was originally deployed on Canessa’s nine parcel estate. It now resides in its own DCL Worlds realm. He deployed it before the newer four parcel limit was established.
He dove into the SDK and implemented “auto-dance” in Casa Roustan after first seeing it at the 2021 Metaverse Festival. “Before that there were zombies everywhere.” He claims to have created the first hot tub in Decentraland. Undeterred by the limitation of no video textures in DCL, he created a new method to simulate water. He set up a VIP teleport to prevent bots from snagging all the POAPs at Casa Roustan.
After looking back with Roustan for more than an hour and a half during his interview, I asked him where he thought he’d be in the coming year. “I will be innovating. Capitalizing on AR and VR. Whenever I think about the future and I think about what can be done and what should be done, it’s exhausting. But I’ll do it.” Whatever gets done you can bet Roustan will be one of the first doing it.
