If collectors choose they can assemble a finite number of Black Dragons. NFTs casualise collection and trading, introduce rampant gamification, and, if you have the money, its makers invite you to join a community of owner-investors with whom you can interact. Non-Fungible Tokens not only present a new way to affix authenticity and ownership history into digital-format artworks, they also reimagine what art can be.

Involving collectors in the work of co-creation, Rayner is exploiting the dynamic potential for NFTs to interact and change over time. The standalone image may be eye-catchingly pretty but its capacity to tesselate with further tiles is what makes it dynamic and, one supposes, new. To purchase one of Rayner’s NFTs is to take possession of a digital ‘tile’, together with its copyright. Composite arrangements of tiles promote owners’ creativity This art lives on the hard drive and the screen the stuff on the walls here is the byproduct. Pioneering formats do not, as he puts it, “come along every day”. And leaving art school, putting away his brushes and adopting the medium of code has let him forge new paths with a new medium. Years he allegedly spent meditating for four to five hours every day have translated into ready sales. In the realm of the NFT, his lifelong passion for geometry appears to be paying off. The well-dressed creator is the spry, smiling guru at the heart of this gathering. What painter could render this machinic imbroglio? It would take a mathematician plus an artist, but Rayner appears to be both. Colour, subtly graded, comes with a painterly palette. Rayner’s dragons seem to pivot round googly eyes, to expand in all directions as if directed by Benoit Mandelbrot. With their looping and sinuous forms, they evoke traditional Chinese painting. His prints here are strikingly large, impossibly complex, compiled in absorbing layers. It is here to signal the launch of a work comprised of NFTs, Quasi Dragon Studies by New York artist Harvey Rayner.

The art on the walls is not the art, but the backdrop. Single tiles follow algorithmic logic to throw up complex and unexpected forms

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