Holy Bic

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."

Holy Bic — the Bic logo, repeated like a litany across the top and bottom borders, frames a veiled Madonna in soft gray halftone crowned by a massive black crown of thorns. A flaming sacred heart glows at the lower right; a shadowy torso with arms raised pushes through from behind. The title does three things at once: it names the tool (the Bic ballpoint pen that literally drew this work), it invokes the sacred, and it echoes the pop-art tradition of elevating commercial logos to icon status — Warhol's Campbell's, Hirst's pill cabinets, now Sebi's Bic. The pen that draws the Madonna IS the Madonna. Tool, subject, and material collapse into one.

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About the artist