Black Beauty

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.

Black Beauty — a rearing horse in red halftone, Ferrari's Cavallino Rampante pushed to 200% masculinity — power, speed, dominance, the stallion as everything men project onto themselves. Inside the silhouette, a girl in her underwear — desire contained within the symbol of force. A gold leaf line cuts horizontally across the composition, censoring bare breasts, a gesture that simultaneously hides and highlights. The title's irony runs deep: beauty as object, beauty as animal, beauty as the thing men chase and women perform. The piece exaggerates the pull between masculine and feminine — like magnets, the two forces attract and repel, but can they ever become one? Courbet painted L'Origine du monde behind a curtain; here, the curtain is a stallion, and the gold leaf pretends to be decency.

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About the artist

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