Genoma

Raphael Tobar (born June 3, 1985), known as Genoma, is a low-polygonal, digital animal artist native to Miami, Florida. He began his artistic sensibilities as a youth under his father's sign painting and vinyl installation business. This early access to design tools helped him gain familiarity with vector operations common in most digital software, and a gateway towards 3D modeling & rendering later in life. This early experience allowed him to be fluent in a variety of digital mixed media techniques.

During high school, Tobar became deeply interested in art and befriended Cuban painter Ramón Alejandro through his son and childhood friend Charles. Both have been philosophically influential and helped Tobar to think symbolically away from graffiti art. By 2007, Tobar decided to devote his work to animal art.

Tobar considers his animal art, beginning with "Neighborhood I (Hummingbird Colliding Against A Surface)" in 2019, to be part of a style he calls "Meta-Naturalism." Meta-Naturalism is a combination of several early 20th century preoccupations: the beauty of movement & speed in Italian Futurism, the finitude of life & extinction in Franz Marc's German expressionist animal art, and figurative abstraction inspired by origami and non-Western cultures. These historical, artistic endeavors together provide a unique perspective regarding the representation of organic life.

The principal subject in a meta-naturalist work would appear to be the animal figure, but the underlying mechanism is "nature's play." Such play is manifested as physical, causal forces and their effects, the perception of an event, and the speculation of how an animal sees the world. The ultimate goal for meta-naturalism is to depict such various aspects associated with nature's play with interpretative power, further reinforcing its self-aware artificiality. Meta-Naturalism is at once at the crossroads between expressionism and realism.