Hands on
Sebi Schager (AT)
“Hands on”, 2023
Pen drawing on laid paper, 350g/m²
100x70cm, signed by the artist.
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."
Hands on — an ironic title for a work drawn entirely by machine. The image layers a hand resting on the back of a female torso with a detail from Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina — those marble fingers pressing into Proserpina's thigh, one of the most tactile moments in sculpture history. The two source images merge in a photographic double-exposure effect, figures dissolving into each other as if touch itself were blurring the boundary between bodies. The plotter traces this collision of intimacy and art history with mechanical indifference — ballpoint ink rendering what fingers feel.
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