Modern Mosaics: Trompe L’oeil Paintings by Refreshink

Italian street artist Giovanni Magnoli, better known as Refreshink, creates paintings and murals that mimic the fractured geometry of ancient mosaic, built tile by tile, but without actual stone. His ongoing Iconosaik project, launched in 2022, breaks images into hand-painted fragments, turning paint into a convincing trompe l’oeil surface.

Each piece carries the rhythm of tesserae with imperfect blocks of colour forming masks, icons, portraits, symbols and pop-cultural references. The technique gives his work a strange double life, where analog pixels and Roman mosaics combine to celebrate both ancient craft and graffiti culture. A Renaissance-style portrait, Banksy’s flower thrower and a smiley face all become part of the same visual system. Pop iconography gets aged by centuries in a single canvas.

For more of Giovanni Magnoli’s work, follow Refreshink on Instagram.

More art on the grid via Artsper