Oriental Hentai

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."

Oriental Hentai puts the collision right in the title — "Oriental," the loaded Western gaze on Asia that Edward Said dismantled in 1978, meets "Hentai," a Japanese genre that the West consumed and misunderstood in equal measure. The composition layers a Michelangelo drawing with a figure cut from an Orientalist painting — caged, exoticized — alongside Romantic nudity, a manga girl in black drawn in her underwear, and a Raphael study where young and old share the frame, hands reaching forward as if breaking through the picture plane into three dimensions. Five centuries of how the West has looked at bodies — idealised, eroticised, caged, cartoonified — plotted in red, blue, and black ballpoint on the same sheet of paper. Sebi doesn't judge the tension, he just makes it visible.

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About the artist