The book
About EMOJI OLD MASTERS
Book preview
Large Square 12×12 on Blurb
Emoji Old Masters is a 12 × 12 inch art book: public-domain paintings rebuilt as mosaics whose ink is color emoji. Each plate starts from a Wikimedia Commons reproduction of a work in the public domain — van Gogh, Vermeer, Hokusai, Gentileschi, and hundreds more — then maps the picture onto a grid of glyphs.
The idea is simple. A painting is a field of color. Emoji, treated as a palette rather than a punchline, can carry that field. The book sets the type large enough to read as both image and inventory: from across the room it is the picture; up close it is a tessellation of symbols.
A denser 3× edition pushes the same method further — smaller cells, more glyphs, a closer equivalent of the source. Print assets for those editions are separate. This site does not serve those PDFs or SVGs. Every mosaic here is computed live, in the browser, from the painting itself and a fixed emoji palette (system color emoji / Twemoji-style glyphs).
There are 484 plates in the catalog. Search the gallery, open a work to change density, or try your own image. Share publishes a medium JPEG and the emoji text to the public archive at github.com/maximusmaximus/oldmaster.
The author
Max Infeld
Max Infeld is a generative artist who prefers the pipes to the plaza. He works where art and tech leak into each other — fluorescent, damp, and a little dishonest about which way is up. For years he has been building machines that eat archives and spit pictures: public-domain paintings forced through palettes, noise folded into ornament, systems that pretend to be taste.
He will tell you he is slimy in the sewers. That is not a metaphor he is trying to escape. The sewer is the correct studio for this work. Old Masters painted toward heaven with ground minerals and patience. Infeld paints with other people’s masterpieces and a grid of emoji, crouched in the municipal dark with a laptop that should not still turn on.
The result is not a joke about the canon. It is a way of admitting that every picture is already a mosaic — of labor, of pigment, of whatever symbols a century happens to have on its phone. Emoji Old Masters is one of those descents. If you find something beautiful in it, that is the sludge catching the light.
maxi.grok.me
Studio, type, and public practice