Vitruvian Pepe

Sebi works across spray stencils, robotic pen drawing, gold leaf, and digital collage — his practice moves between appropriation and reinvention, art-historical imagery taken apart, digitally recombined, then brought back into physical form. The Thx for the Brush series extends the painter's space with robotic tools: compositions emerge from digital collages, cutouts, and elements that develop directly on the paper — the work builds up on the sheet as much as it arrives from the screen. Many follow the Wheel of Fortune — Sebi collects thematic image sets from art history, pop culture, and the internet, runs them through the randomizer, and lets unexpected constellations emerge. The plotter translates, but the encounter between pen and paper introduces variables neither artist nor machine fully controls — ink pools, skips, bleeds. Tinguely built drawing machines to question authorship in 1959; Sebi's plotter picks up that thread sixty years later. "The miracle has already happened once something is physically manifested."

Vitruvian Pepe puts two of the most appropriated images in history into the same frame — Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (c. 1490), the Enlightenment's gold standard for human proportion and reason, and Pepe the Frog, the internet's most contested meme figure. The Vitruvian Man emerges in dense blue halftone, arms outstretched in the famous circle-and-square composition, while Pepe is drawn over it in loose red-pink outlines — grinning, unavoidable. Renaissance idealism meets post-internet absurdism. Both images have been endlessly copied, stripped of their original context, and loaded with new meaning by cultures that never asked for permission. Sebi just makes that process visible.

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About the artist