Connor Gottfried Opaque (Purple) For Sale

About this work

Opaque (Purple) is a sculptural work created by Connor Gottfried in 2025, comprising acrylic with a clear layer, an 8-inch IPS panel, a Raspberry Pi 4b, and a wireless NES controller running a Super Mario Bros. Deluxe ROM. The work measures 14 × 8.5 × 3.5 inches—a compact, hand-scale object that contrasts markedly with the wall-hung architectural scale of Gottfried's aluminum composite works. The material shift to purple acrylic with a clear layer is significant: where the aluminum composite panelling of CTRL-C and New Worlds has an industrial, architectural quality, the acrylic body of Opaque (Purple) is soft, luminescent, and gemlike—recalling the coloured translucent plastic of the Nintendo Game Boy Color and the GameCube, and evoking the particular chromatic language of 1990s consumer electronics design. The title's double meaning is characteristic of Gottfried's approach. Opaque as a material quality: the purple acrylic is not fully transparent, its colour filtering the inner workings of the electronics behind it. Opaque as a conceptual term: something hidden, unreadable, resistant to easy interpretation. The wireless NES controller represents a further temporal layering—the original NES hardware communicated through wired controllers, while the wireless version is a contemporary retrofit, the present imposing its expectations of convenience onto a technology that predates them. Opaque (Purple) demonstrates the full range of Gottfried's sculptural practice: where CTRL-C and New Worlds make architectural statements, this smaller work creates an intimate, almost domestic object—something one might hold in one's hands, turning it to catch the light, as much as a work viewed at a distance. The Super Mario Bros. Deluxe ROM connects the work to the foundational Nintendo IP—video gaming's equivalent of a canonical text—while the purple acrylic body transforms it into something genuinely strange and beautiful, an object of contemplation as much as play.