Backwards Donald

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. Manus et Machina continues where Thx for the Brush left off — but here, the human hand returns after the machine has drawn. Each piece begins as a robotic pen drawing from a digital collage, then receives layers of spray paint, crayon, and gold leaf applied by hand. The result is a dialogue between precision and gesture, algorithm and instinct. Silhouette and halftone raster compete for the viewer's attention in a perceptual toggle — you see one or the other, rarely both at once. The gold leaf adds a final layer: eternity meeting impermanence, icon meeting street.

Backwards Donald — Disney's most recognizable duck, mirrored. The familiar silhouette is flipped left-to-right, just enough to short-circuit decades of brand recognition — you know who it is, but something feels wrong. Inside the blue halftone outline, the Disney castle itself emerges: the brand's most sacred logo rasterized into the body of its most temperamental character. A gold leaf bow tie sits at the neck — precious and absurd against the mass-produced icon. The title works on every level: backwards as in reversed, but also backwards as in regressive — the moment a children's entertainment empire aligns itself with political power, the fairy tale runs in the wrong direction. The castle lives inside the duck the way corporate identity lives inside every character it owns.

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About the artist

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