Weekend Cowboy

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.

Weekend Cowboy — a cowboy stands wide-legged in red halftone, hat tilted, coat catching wind like a spaghetti western freeze-frame. Inside the silhouette, a face appears — mouth open, gaze heavy, unmistakably lascivious. The perceptual toggle runs between hyper-masculine pose and hyper-feminine desire, each defining the other from the inside out. Richard Prince rephotographed Marlboro ads in the 1980s to prove the cowboy was always a fiction; here the fiction is split open, and what lives inside the swagger is longing, not grit. A gold leaf heart sits right on the cowboy's chest — cut through by a black paint cup ring, the studio leaving its own mark on the myth. Nobody wins this standoff: the masculine front needs the feminine gaze, the gaze needs the silhouette to hold it. Spray drops scatter like dust on a trail that leads nowhere in particular. The title gives it away: this is not the real thing, just a weekend version, a costume that comes off on Monday.

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About the artist

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