Holy Mary and Banana

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.

Holy Mary and Banana — the title names its ingredients with deadpan honesty. The silhouette is a banana — phallic, unavoidable — and inside it the Virgin Mary appears, hand on her chest, a kitsch rendering of religion's highest ideal: pure love, pure innocence. The sacred penetrates the profane, or is it the other way around? At the top, the banana breaks through the gold leaf halo — the phallus piercing the sacred circle. The piece asks the question that centuries of Christian art worked hard to suppress: what happens when devotion and desire share the same body? Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa already knew the answer — the boundary between religious rapture and physical longing was never as clear as the Church needed it to be.

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About the artist

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