“We don’t return to Ultima IV for the gameplay. We return for the visuals.”

‘The Shrine of Justice’ is based on a screenshot of the 1980s computer role-playing game Ultima IV. The work is part of Pocobelli’s Nostalgia Studies series, which celebrates the visual influences that helped shape his youth and that continue to inform his art practice to this day. He was introduced to the game when he was 7 years old, and he considers its visual design by Richard Garriott (Lord British) to be an ‘early masterpiece of digital art.’

Pocobelli has been working on the Nostalgia Studies series since 2015, when he began making drawings and paintings of 1980s space Lego boxes, which had a deep influence on his aesthetic sensibility. Later, the series expanded to include trading cards, comics, Apple II computer games, Star Wars action figure boxes, postage stamps, board games, Roland equipment manuals and more.

“Despite their commercial purpose, I consider these designs to be amongst the most important visual creations of the 1980s, ranking alongside the decade’s greatest paintings in terms of their quality and aesthetic impact. It gives me joy to give homage to what I consider to be an unrecognized canon of visual design that provides an unending source of inspiration to me and my work.”