Hybrid creatures playing instruments, unsettling figures emerging from the dark, watercolour horses and stylised landscapes beneath black clouds. The work of illustrator Stefano Tesei resists easy categorisation, and seems to have no interest in being categorised. Every image appears to open new worlds and imaginaries.
Born in Cattolica in 1992, Tesei trained between the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and ISIA Urbino, where he completed his degree in image graphics and illustration. A dual background, spanning technology and visual craft, that is reflected in the range of registers his work moves across.
Tesei’s images thrive on contrast. On one side, chaotic and hypersaturated compositions populated by a visual carnival without hierarchy. On the other, black-and-white illustrations built on sharp fields of ink, where unsettling figures emerge from luminous backgrounds with an energy that reads as manga reinterpreted through a disturbing lens.
“My drawings generally emerge from a mosaic of images I collect and keep in my sketchbooks. I try to depict settings and characters by blending the ironic, the quirky and the fantastical with a dark and unsettling atmosphere. The aim is to create contrasts and generative narratives,” the illustrator said at the Sexto ‘Nplugged festival in 2023.
His collaborations span animation and illustration, extending into music, with a constant focus on self-publishing and education through workshops and studios. Among his most recent projects, a contribution to the illustrated insert of Fulminacci‘s album infinito+1, a collective work that tells the record song by song through the vision of twelve different illustrators. Experimentation remains the guiding principle of a practice that finds its most authentic form in the tension between opposites.
