We live in an age of instant gratification that has touched almost every sphere of our lives – from fashion to interior architecture. Imagine a luxurious, carefully designed interior: natural marble, Italian leather, perfectly chosen warm light. And on the wall? Sometimes a faded poster from a chain store hangs there, bought “for a while”, which has hung in the same place for five years and in time became completely invisible to the household. That is the quintessence of the phenomenon known as fast art.

Fast art is mass decoration that builds no deep atmosphere at all but merely fills the emptiness on a wall mechanically. Buying cheap reproductions printed in thousands of copies on ordinary poster paper, we acquire a product devoid of soul, history and the maker's intention. As the months pass, under the influence of UV radiation, colors lose their saturation, and the interior itself loses its distinctness. A conscious aesthete who values harmony and authenticity in life cannot afford such compromises.

What makes a fine art print different from a mass-market poster?

The opposite of fleeting trends and mediocrity is crafted art, which is the foundation of the idea behind Odoardo Art™. We reject mass printing in favor of the highest gallery standards. The Chapter that reaches your living room under a subscription is an authorized collector's copy. The decisive difference is the medium: the professional fine art print is made on thick archival cotton paper.

Unlike standard paper containing lignin, which yellows and grows brittle over time, pure cotton keeps its whiteness and flexibility for decades. In addition, to protect the pigment from degradation, every work is secured with varnish and mounted in an oak mini-frame. Such a considerable difference in the structure of the raw material affects not only the longevity of a work but above all the way it absorbs light in a room. We explore this theme in the article describing archival fine art paper.

The maker meets the patron

Real art requires provenance, authorization and an archive. The value of a work is decided as much by its rarity and its direct bond with the maker as by the medium. In an era of mass duplication, a handwritten mark on paper rises to the rank of luxury. That is precisely why every one of our fine art prints receives an individual number and is signed by hand in pencil by the artist.

Choosing works from our selected catalog of artists, representing makers from different corners of the world, you become a conscious collector. Along with the physical work in its oak frame, you also receive a personal letter from its author, bearing their own signature. That letter reveals the emotions and intentions that accompanied the painting of the picture, building a priceless value you will not find on chain-store shelves. If you want to learn how important the physical attributes attesting a work's provenance are, we encourage you to read Authorization and signature.

Prestige in business and domestic space

Giving up fast art also has colossal significance in the B2B dimension. Law offices, exclusive board rooms, private clinics and luxury hotels are spaces where details communicate a brand's credibility unerringly. Hanging a cheap, generic poster on the wall is, in business, the equivalent of having a free, unprofessional email address.

Just as Odoardo Space™ builds the authority of an address reserved for a single brand – described in The cheap address trap – so Odoardo Art™ attends to the authority of the physical space in which strategic decisions are made. What exactly such works communicate to business partners we develop in Art in the CEO office (C-Level).

Conscious collecting and support for art

Replacing flat, disposable decorations with noble prints is a shift in life philosophy from consumer to curator. As our client, we do not use the word “consumer” about you – you are a patron and a curator of space, choosing for yourself a new chapter in the story of your interior. And it is very real patronage, because fully 20% of the patron's average net quarterly price per frame goes straight to the maker of the work published in it, supporting the maker's further artistic development on the global stage.

Cut yourself off from an aesthetic that is repetitive and impermanent. Choose art with a signature that will hold your guests' gaze and give depth to the most important spaces in your home and office.

Why authenticity is sometimes more valuable than information delivered plainly is described in the Odoardo™ manifesto.