Hard You Know

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."

Hard You Know — the phrase hangs between confession and street slang. The composition leans into that tension visually: rendered almost entirely in red, the layered elements — a half-naked manga torso, haute couture, a 1950s pin-up, a fan — become hard for the eye to separate, merging into a dense field where figure and ground refuse to cooperate. The viewer has to work to find the image — and that effort is what's hard, you know.

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About the artist