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04/09/2026

Cuban puppeteer Víctor Ariosa, aka Galeria Morionet, has turned painting into a live puppet performance.
His wooden marionette, Morionet, holds the brush, dips it into the paint and recreates famous artworks on tiny canvases — while dancing to music along the way.

Ariosa created Morionet in 2018 after being challenged to make a puppet that could paint. Today, his performances combine puppetry, painting, theatre and street art, with Ariosa controlling every movement from behind the miniature stage.

Based in Mexico City, he has become a familiar presence around Coyoacán, where audiences gather to watch the impossible-looking process unfold in real time.

Is the artist Ariosa, the puppet Morionet — or both?

03/09/2026

Myrsini Alexandridi is a Greek architect, painter and ceramic artist, born in 1991 and now based in Stockholm.
Her architectural training strongly informs her practice, where the humble ceramic tile becomes both canvas and building block.
She combines Mediterranean colours, Greek landscapes, traditional patterns and architectural forms with a distinctly Scandinavian sense of simplicity.

Alexandridi hand-paints each tile individually, often using enamel colours and a technique related to pointillism.
She first divides her composition into a grid of individual tiles, then reconstructs the fragmented image as a larger whole.
The result sits beautifully between painting, architecture, design and ceramics.

Her exhibitions include a solo show at Galleri Hind in Stockholm, Ceramic & Art in Athens, 60 Days of Design in Patras and A Bizarre Dinner in Aegina. In 2026 she is participating in the Biennale of Contemporary Ceramics in Rhodes and the Kakelhuset group exhibition in Stockholm.

Her work is a wonderful reminder that a tile can be much more than a surface—it can become a fragment of architecture, memory and cultural identity.

01/09/2026

Marco Grassi is an Italian painter born in 1987, known for pushing oil painting into an extraordinary territory between hyperrealism, surrealism and symbolism. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and developed his technique through an intense study of the Old Masters, particularly their subtle modelling and Renaissance sfumato.

His paintings are built through painstaking layers and extremely fine brushwork. Skin, hair, feathers and tiny variations of colour are rendered with such precision that the paintings can initially look photographic. But Grassi is interested in more than copying reality: his figures often undergo strange metamorphoses, bringing together the human body, nature and symbolic imagery. Some paintings can take months or even more than a year to complete.

Grassi has exhibited internationally, including at the Italian Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia and Art Basel, as well as solo exhibitions in London, Los Angeles, Berlin and elsewhere.

The woman embracing the swan in the painting you mention immediately evokes the ancient myth of Leda and the Swan. In Greek mythology, Zeus transformed himself into a swan and approached Leda, the queen of Sparta. The story has inspired artists for centuries—from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Cézanne and Dalí—because of its mixture of beauty, transformation, desire and the unsettling relationship between human and divine.

Grassi's painting is oil on canvas, 150 × 160 cm, but the swan makes the classical reference particularly compelling. His contemporary hyperrealism brings an ancient myth into an almost photographic present, while leaving the viewer to decide whether the scene represents seduction, transformation, danger—or all three.

30/08/2026

'Umbrella' by the creative collective Euphrates is a wonderfully engineered optical illusion that makes an ordinary object appear to defy geometry.
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Created for Hermès’ Ginza Maison window display in Tokyo, the umbrella was part of 'The Room Where Things Barely Fit', presented in 2018.
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The umbrella sits at an angle on a slowly rotating platform, repeatedly passing through a narrow opening cut into a large upright screen. The opening looks completely incompatible with the umbrella’s diagonal position—yet, as the platform turns, it slips through with millimetre-like precision.
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The trick is not digital. Euphrates carefully designed the movement and geometry so that the umbrella’s three-dimensional path corresponds to the distorted opening. The result is a playful encounter between mathematics, mechanics and perception.
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Euphrates is a Japanese creative group founded by former members of Masahiko Sato’s laboratory at Keio University.
Their work combines scientific research, visual communication, animation, physical mechanisms and media design.

29/08/2026

What if you could try on a painting?
Artist Olohoyo has turned the latest MINJUKIM × 8SECONDS collaboration into a playful paper fashion experiment, recreating the collection as delicate watercolour outfits that can be “worn” and swapped between looks.

The collaboration, titled 'A Bouquet of Heart', brings MINJUKIM’s romantic, fairytale-inspired aesthetic into 8SECONDS’ everyday fashion, with flowers, ribbons, lace and ruffles at its centre.

The second collaboration between the two brands launched in August 2026, following the success of their first partnership.

It’s a lovely example of fashion crossing into illustration and digital play—turning clothes into characters and the act of getting dressed into a small piece of visual storytelling.

Which paper outfit would you choose?

28/08/2026

Vastrini is the pseudonym of Italian artist Valerio Vincenzo, whose unusual street interventions make the wall itself the artwork. Rather than simply placing an image onto a surface, he photographs and meticulously reproduces a section of the wall, then wheatpastes the image back over exactly the same area. The copy becomes almost indistinguishable from the original.

He calls these works 'Idiocies'. They sit somewhere between street art, conceptual art and intervention—and deliberately raise the question of whether something can be called vandalism when the intervention is almost invisible. The work hides reality by reproducing it, creating a strange visual paradox: the original wall is covered, yet simultaneously revealed.

Vastrini has created installations in Saint-Ouen and Montreuil, Paris, including a 2021 street-art trail of 15 works and the exhibition MUE at the former Musée Pierre Cardin in Saint-Ouen.

Invisible vandalism? Or perhaps the most polite form of street art imaginable.

27/08/2026

British land artist Justin Bateman, widely known as Pebble Picassos, creates astonishing portraits and mosaics using nothing but stones and pebbles found in the landscape.
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Bateman's 2024 work 'Isabella' is a temporary portrait inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings.
From a distance, the carefully arranged pebbles form an incredibly detailed face; up close, the image dissolves back into hundreds of individual stones.
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Impermanence is central to Bateman’s practice. Justin's works are deliberately made to disappear, whether through tides, weather, wind or simply being dismantled.
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Justin photographs them before returning the stones to their surroundings. For Bateman, the artwork is therefore not the permanent object, but the encounter between artist, landscape and viewer. 'Isabella' becomes a meditation on beauty, mortality and the fleeting nature of both art and life.

26/08/2026

Evan Penny is a Canadian sculptor renowned for pushing hyperrealism beyond simple imitation.

His sculptures manipulate the human face and body—stretching, compressing and multiplying features until something recognisable becomes strangely unfamiliar.

Penny is particularly interested in the gap between an image and reality, and how photography and digital media have changed the way we perceive bodies.

At the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), his 'Panagiota: Conversation #1', Variation 2 (2008) is currently featured in 'Hyperrealism: This Is Not a Body', running until 12 October 2026.

The silicone, pigment, hair and aluminium sculpture transforms a photographic distortion into a three-dimensional, almost impossible portrait.

Penny’s work makes you question where the real face ends and the image begins—hyperrealism that ultimately becomes surreal.

25/08/2026

Silvia Zacchello is an Italian artist and designer whose practice grew from a simple idea: give discarded furniture a second life through colour.
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After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, she began transforming old chairs and vintage objects with hand-painted acrylic patterns inspired by Pop Art, comics, vintage graphics and her fascination with faces.
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Her brightly painted chairs have become her signature, but she also works on tables, cabinets, lamps, telephones, vases and other rescued objects. Rather than hiding their previous lives, Zacchello turns them into unique pieces of functional art, combining furniture design, painting and upcycling.
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She has collaborated with brands and organisations including Paul Smith, RaiTre, Radio Deejay and Angelini, and her work has been presented through design and art platforms internationally.

24/08/2026

Portuguese artist Diogo Pimentão turns drawing into something physical, sculptural and performative. Based in London, he works primarily with paper and graphite, often pushing drawing beyond the page and into three-dimensional space.

At the Drawing Lab in Paris, his practice was presented as part of 'Performances Dessin', a programme co-produced with the Centre Pompidou.

In his performances, Pimentão works with graphite and paper through repetitive physical actions, transforming the humble pencil and its residue into sculptural material.
The resulting sheets can be folded, layered, crumpled and shaped into structures that resemble metal rather than paper.

His performance at Drawing Lab took place on 28 January 2026, alongside the Grand Palais - RMN (Officiel) exhibition 'Dessins sans Limite'.
Here, drawing literally leaves the surface and begins to inhabit the space around it.

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