Pixel Mandela

Coloured pencil and ink pen on paper

33 × 50 cm / 13 × 19.7 in, 2020

Available — €550

In Pixel Mandela, recognition does not involve only a face, but also a historical image. I chose to represent Nelson Mandela at the moment of his release because it is a scene that has entered collective memory.

Even when the face is reduced to a few elements, the context, the posture and the familiarity of the image help the viewer reconstruct what is missing. In this work, distance is part of the piece: from afar, the portrait appears more recognizable, while up close it breaks down into individual hand-coloured pixels.

I was interested in using such a recognizable image to show how much memory takes part in the construction of what we see.