A Girl and a Snake

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."

A Girl and a Snake activates one of the oldest pairings in Western iconography — Eve and the Serpent, Cleopatra and the Asp, Medusa and her crown of snakes. The combination of female figure and reptile has carried associations of temptation, danger, wisdom, and forbidden knowledge since Genesis. Here, a beauty with dreadlocks and a snake dissolve into each other — skin and scales merging in the halftone field until it's unclear where the girl ends and the snake begins. The two images don't sit side by side; they inhabit each other, the way the archetype has always worked: woman and serpent as one thing, inseparable since the garden.

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About the artist