Lucky Luke, 2026

Sank  

Sank takes on one of the most instantly recognisable silhouettes in Franco-Belgian comics and rebuilds it block by block, the way one might assemble a video-game sprite. The lone cowboy juts out from the wall in relief, legs apart, hands hovering over his holsters, caught in that split second before the draw — the moment when the man who shoots faster than his shadow hasn't moved yet.

The work sets two eras against each other. Its visual vocabulary is that of pixel art and 8-bit graphics, inherited from geek culture and the first games consoles; its subject belongs to the heritage of Morris's drawing. Between the two, the construction from stacked modules also echoes the fragmented volumes of Cubism — the grammar the artist made his own in Céret. The character isn't drawn, it's built: each coloured block works as a plane, a facet, a unit of meaning.

The palette stays faithful to the original — white hat, black waistcoat, yellow shirt, red neckerchief, blue jeans — but the material shifts things. These painted wooden volumes, with their sharp edges and matte surfaces, give the paper hero a physical, almost sculptural presence. The offsets between blocks cast faint shadows that animate the surface as the light changes, a reminder that the work exists in space, not only on a plane.

Hung on the wall with no frame and no backing, the piece owns its cut-out shape. It keeps something of the graffiti spirit the artist came from: a figure placed directly on its support, asserting itself through its silhouette before inviting a closer reading.

Note on two choices: "waistcoat" is British English — use "vest" for a US-facing site. And I kept "Franco-Belgian comics" rather than the more explanatory "the Franco-Belgian tradition", which would read better if your English-speaking audience is unlikely to know the genre.