Africa is not just a place—it’s a rhythm, a palette, a heartbeat. It’s a visual language of pattern, color, texture, and soul. This is how Africa’s patterns and spirit shaped my mosaic art.
For me, Africa has always been more than inspiration. It’s a mirror and a map—a place I return to. The African Bricks series is my tribute to that world: a mosaic art series born from admiration, respect, and fascination with African culture.
For me, Africa has always been more than inspiration. It’s a mirror and a map—a place I return to. The African Bricks series is my tribute to that world: a mosaic art series born from admiration, respect, and fascination with African culture.
I have studied African textiles, street art, matchbox houses, masks, murals, and traditional crafts for over 15 years. What I found was not just beauty, but meaning. Every brick, every fabric pattern, every burst of red or indigo in African design tells a story.
To create my African Bricks tiles, I’ve built a personal digital archive of over 100 African textile traditions, drawing from field research, museum archives, and algorithmic design. From Ghana’s Kente cloth and Mali’s Bogolanfini mud cloth, to South Africa’s Shweshwe prints and Tuareg indigo textiles, I’ve reinterpreted each motif into unique digital tiles using a fusion of manual artistry and custom machine-learning tools. This extensive visual taxonomy reflects the continent’s astonishing diversity—geometry, symbolism, color, and rhythm—all infused into the DNA of my mosaics. Every tile celebrates culture, a memory fragment, and a tool for storytelling through design.
How I Do It?
Every mosaic in the African Bricks series results from a carefully designed process that blends technology with intuition. I use custom-built algorithms to digitally compose thousands of elements—textures, patterns, symbols, colors—into unified portraits. But the software is just the beginning.
Each tile is personally selected and refined, ensuring that the image breathes. Whether printed on wood, canvas, jacquard fabric, or sculpted in 3D form, every portrait is a mosaic of meaning—shaped by code, guided by feeling, and grounded in storytelling.
Custom algorithms "Tsevis Deep Mosaic"
From Athens to Africa: Where Inspiration Became Architecture
I was invited to create something meaningful that would not just decorate the space but reflect its soul. What came to me was the idea of the matchbox house: those small, resilient homes found in townships like Soweto. Modest in structure but filled with pride, color, and community, they symbolize creativity and dignity.
African restaurant in Athens, Greece
African Bricks printed on wood
Brick by brick, I created mosaic portraits of the people. They were characters shaped by observation and feeling—faces that could have lived in those neighborhoods, whose spirit I tried to capture through form, hue, and texture.
I printed those works directly on wood using high-end techniques: UV inks and multi-layered varnish in SwissQ printing to give every brick a tactile dimension. It was the beginning of something much bigger than I expected. I had opened a new creative door for myself. This is how my first African bricks series was built.
Jacquard woven African Bricks "The water girl"
African Bricks, Woven in Thread: A Jacquard Fabric Edition
In my ongoing journey to translate digital art into physical experience, I’ve brought the African Bricks series to life through textile jacquard fabric. Woven—not printed—jacquard uses a sophisticated loom technique that Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented in the early 1800s. This revolutionary method was one of the first to use punch card algorithms, making it a direct ancestor of computer programming and digital logic.
Each thread in a jacquard weave follows a coded pattern, similar to the pixels and tesserae in my mosaics. That’s why this medium felt so right—it combines craft and code, texture and technology. The rich surface adds depth to the artwork, echoing the brick-by-brick construction of African townships. It’s a tribute to structure, heritage, and the unseen human or mathematical systems that hold things together.
Singularis: The African Bricks, Reimagined in the Physical World
Years later, the African Bricks found a new form. A new body. A new weight. With Singularis. My wife and I brought these portraits off the screen and into physical, layered, sculptural art. Each piece is printed, cut, assembled, painted, and sculpted by hand. The bricks are no longer digital illusions—they are fragments infused with materials like paper, gold leaf, fabric, acrylics, relief painting, and varnish.
Still inspired by the same patterns, colors, and stories, these works go deeper, exploring identity not just through visual language but through tangible substance. They are fragile yet bold, clean yet complex, modern yet ancestral.
Over the years, the African Bricks series has grown into a multi-chapter series. It began with African Bricks and continued with African Bricks II, a deeper dive into African textiles, beauty, and rhythm, expanding the visual language with bold patterns and imagined characters. African Bricks III honored the strength and spirit of African women.
And now, my new African Bricks IV.
These four chapters represent an artistic journey shaped by love, study, and respect for African heritage.
And now, my new African Bricks IV.
These four chapters represent an artistic journey shaped by love, study, and respect for African heritage.
But this is far from the end. I’ve created nearly 17,000 unique tiles. For me, African Bricks isn’t a project; it’s a living journey. A tribute that keeps evolving, piece by piece, story by story, tile by tile.
The African Bricks are no longer just mosaics—they’ve become ritual objects, full of history, humanity, and presence.
This transformation feels natural to me because Africa is not still. It is living, moving, and evolving, and so is my work.
All artworks from the African Bricks series are available as Limited Edition Fine Art Prints, signed and numbered. Each piece is printed with the highest archival standards on museum-quality materials, offering a lasting experience. These mosaics are crafted to live on with meaning.
