Joker

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."

Joker layers three worlds that were never meant to meet: a fairy-like magical figure rendered in red outlines, a playing-card Joker in blue — grinning, cross-legged, surrounded by flying dollar bills — and a dark male figure borrowed from Orientalist painting cutting through in black. The "Joker" stamp sits off-center like a seal of approval on something nobody authorized. The jester has always been the one figure allowed to speak truth to power; here, that archetype collides with fantasy, Orientalism's exotic projections, and the raw mechanics of money. A visual tarot card drawn in ballpoint, where the joke might be on whoever thinks they get it.

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About the artist