A Big Stretch

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.

A Big Stretch — the phrase works both ways: a body bending past its limit, and the colloquial accusation of reaching too far. A figure arches into a yoga backbend in red halftone, the bridge pose pushed to its extreme. Inside the silhouette, a bodybuilder's torso emerges in negative — ultra-femininity containing ultra-masculinity, stereotype locked inside stereotype. Black spray drops and hand-drawn circles punctuate the surface, the manual layer that separates Manus et Machina from the pure plotter work. Cindy Sherman spent decades photographing herself as constructed female archetypes to expose the performance behind every gender image; Sebi nests one archetype inside the other and lets the collision speak for itself.

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About the artist

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