Danilo Xhema: Visual Déjà Vus
In Conversation with Danilo Xhema: On Pop Culture, Digital Painting, and Everything
Danilo Xhema, Sailor Moon from I Want Everything!, 2025.
For Danilo Xhema, painting never stopped—it just changed tools. Working with vectors and gradients in Illustrator, the Italian artist treats the screen as a new kind of canvas, translating the gestures of painting into digital precision. In his new series I Want Everything!, curated by Kika Nicolela for objkt.one, Xhema turns the chaos of contemporary image culture into something strangely calm and deliberate. Supermarket flyers, movie stills, and video game screenshots become material for a painterly investigation of how desire, nostalgia, and attention collide online.
Xhema speaks about Pop Art with both reverence and distance. For him, it is not about repeating the language of Warhol or Lichtenstein but about recognizing that pop culture has become the air we breathe, an unavoidable condition rather than a movement. Every image today, he suggests, carries a trace of recognition, a déjà vu shaped by constant circulation. His works do not quote Pop Art; they metabolize it. Celebrities, film scenes, and commercial graphics appear not as ironic commentary but as fragments of a shared visual memory. In Xhema’s view, “everything” is not a slogan of excess but a way to describe the collapse of boundaries between high and low, original and copy, painting and file, and a reflection of how we see and desire in the digital age.
Danilo Xhema, Quit from I Want Everything!, 2025.
In conversation with Anika Meier, Xhema explores the tension between tradition and technology. He reflects on how pop culture, memory, and image saturation inform his artistic process.
Anika Meier: You come from a painting background and still paint, but you’re also very active online as an artist. How do you see yourself or your life as an artist in the online world?
Danilo Xhema: I tend to present myself first of all as a painter. That’s the main thing I do, even in the digital realm. As you’ve seen in my works, even if it’s not always visible at first glance, I’m essentially painting digitally. I work entirely with vectors and Illustrator, so in a way I’m still painting, just with different tools. In terms of concept and intention, I approach everything as painting because the idea is always the main focus—the reason behind a collection, a series, or a specific piece.
There’s always an image that inspires me, something I come across while scrolling online, reading magazines or books, or looking at things that are now considered vintage from the 1990s or early 2000s. Even when I exhibit physically, I include my digital works as well. I try to combine those two worlds and create a dialogue between them.
AM: Somehow I suddenly feel old. (laughs)
DX: I was born in 2002, so I’m young in that sense.
There are things I’ve lived through, but I was a child then, so I don’t really remember or relate to them fully anymore.
AM: Is the title of your new body of work, I Want Everything!, connected to that feeling of not remembering the experience itself, but remembering the images?
DX: I started thinking about this series about a year ago. I wanted to do something a bit bigger, with more pieces. I asked myself, what should I do? What can I do? I needed to find a motif, a reason for creating this series. While searching and cataloguing ideas, I thought, why not just do everything that comes to mind?
When I go for a walk and see a poster or a flyer, I take a picture and make something from it. When I go to the supermarket and see discount flyers, I take a picture and make something from that too. When I watch a film and notice a beautiful or iconic frame, it becomes part of that same pop-cultural research, because right now, everything is pop.
Danilo Xhema, Ordinary Angels from I Want Everything!, 2025.
On social media, everything seems to have a price. Everything is visible, tangible, and accessible to everyone. So it became this idea: I want everything, I want to do everything, and I want to see everything.
AM: Are you sure that you want everything?
DX: Of course it’s meant in an ironic way, because I don’t actually want everything.
“The constant marketing and overload of images make me feel like I should, that I should want to see everything, do everything, and even own everything.” – Danilo Xhema
AM: How did you make the final selection of artworks based on such an ambitious concept? What were your criteria for choosing what represents the idea of “everything”?
DX: It could be anything, because in this series there are more iconic people, stars, singers, movies, and quotations. I start from an idea. For example, I watched Dolls, a film directed by Takeshi Kitano. I saw it and thought, Wow, this film is really good. I liked these two characters, so I took a screenshot of them. Then I made two pieces, drew everything, and combined the two characters into a single image where they could coexist.
From that image, another idea came to mind, which connected to the previous ones—even through the titles and descriptions.
There are so many things that inspire me to work and help me figure out what I should draw or create. Now, in my everyday life, the things I consume also make me think about creating art that’s directly connected to what I live and see.
Danilo Xhema, Joypad, 2022.
AM: What does your creative process look like when you’re making these digital paintings?
DX: It’s actually quite simple, though I find it conceptually interesting. In a way, I literally copy the things that I see. As a painter, that act of copying—of translating something from the real world into another medium—is central to how I work.
In my painting practice, I often work from magazines or flyers that I find in everyday life. I keep the magazine next to the panel while I paint, and the result becomes something more impressionistic or expressionistic. I copy the magazine as if it were a landscape or a portrait, transforming it through the act of painting.
In the digital realm, I do something similar, but with a completely different approach. I work in a hyperrealistic way because I don’t want to simply reproduce what I already do on canvas. Instead, I’ve developed a way of working with gradients and vectors in Adobe Illustrator. Every digital piece is built this way—I start from an image, a photo, a character, or a composition, and then reconstruct it using these digital tools, reusing and layering elements until the image feels complete.
Once the composition is done, I move on to color. Lately, I’ve been working with blank or monochrome backgrounds to emphasize the figures and forms even more.
Danilo Xhema, On the Horse from I Want Everything!, 2025.
AM: Your style is very distinct. I recognize a Danilo Xhema immediately when I see it on my timeline.
DX: I’m really happy to hear that. I always try to approach my work in a very particular way, because for me, the idea is the foundation of everything I do. Every piece begins with a concept—it’s what gives form and meaning to the process that follows.
AM: The visual world you create often draws from everyday culture: posters, magazines, and online imagery. Would you say Pop Art has influenced your work, either conceptually or aesthetically? For example, through ideas like the elevation of everyday imagery, consumer culture, reproduction, celebrity, or irony?
DX: I wouldn’t say that I feel directly attached to the Pop Art movement itself. It was an incredibly important and influential moment in art history, one that changed how we think about visual culture and the relationship between art and the everyday.
However, for artists today who continue to work in the same way Pop Art did in the past, I’m not sure that approach still resonates.
“Every artistic language belongs to its time. We have to embrace the context we’re living in—the technologies, the aesthetics, and the social dynamics that define our era. Art should always be understood within the moment of its creation.” – Danilo Xhema
That said, I do believe that everything now is somehow related to pop culture. Even when a work isn’t explicitly about it, there’s always this sense of recognition, as if we’ve seen it before—a visual déjà vu. Whether it’s a painting, a character, or a particular aesthetic, everything today inevitably connects back to pop culture, because that’s the lens through which we experience and understand the world.
Danilo Xhema, Pink; Red from Unreal Lands, 2025.
AM: You often draw from a wide range of sources in your work — from video games and comics to literature and film. How do these different worlds come together in your creative process?
DX: Everything. Everything. I take inspiration from all sorts of things: video games, comics, books, manga, literature, films, series, everything. I play a lot, and I like to absorb what I experience through those worlds. When I play, I don’t just play for entertainment. I try to take elements from what I’m playing—the atmosphere, the storytelling, the visuals—and then remake or repurpose them in my own way.
Anything can become a source of inspiration. For example, I might be playing a video game, and it reminds me of a novel I read years ago. That moment creates a kind of bridge between two very different worlds. I might think about a modern video game alongside a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, something written a hundred years ago or even more. It’s fascinating how those two things can coexist in my imagination and speak to each other.
In the end, everything should be possible. Inspiration has no boundaries.
People of Tezos: Danilo Xhema, 2024.
BIOS
Danilo Xhema (b. 2002, Italy) is a digital artist based in Italy. His work explores the intersection of painting and vector-based forms, with gradients serving as a central element of his research. His practice moves fluidly between physical and digital media, where painting manifests both on tangible canvases and in non-physical forms.
Anika Meier is a writer and curator specializing in digital art. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (Class of UBERMORGEN, Department of Digital Art). She is the co-founder of The Second-Guess, a curatorial collective based in Berlin and Los Angeles that explores the relationship between humans and technology.
INFO
I Want Everything! by Danilo Xhema, curated by Kika Nicolela for objkt.one, will be released on November 27, 2025, on the occasion of Art on Tezos: Berlin, taking place November 6–9, 2025.
