Gallery Helen She
Butterfly Matrix Pixel — Helen SheClick to zoom

Butterfly Matrix

Butterfly Matrix Pixel

Helen She
Dimensions:
100x100cm
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Year:
2026

EUR 3,500

available

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Butterfly Matrix Pixel is an original oil painting by Helen She from the Butterfly Matrix series, in which the visual language of the digital world is recreated entirely by hand.

The butterfly is built from hundreds of small squares. Its outline and grid were marked out by hand in pencil, and then every square was painted individually in oil directly onto the canvas — no stencil, template or digital transfer was used. Shades of green, turquoise and yellow shift from square to square: up close the surface is a field of separate hand-made marks, and only from a distance do they come together into a butterfly, the way pixels form an image on a screen. Against the deep black background, loose squares drift away from the wings and trickle down in thin lines, as if the image were still loading — or already dissolving.

The painting speaks the language of pixels, but its making is completely physical.

Oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm, 2026.

The story behind this piece

The idea came from my children. They have been playing Minecraft for many years, and one day they asked me a simple question: "Why are there no butterflies?"

Butterflies have long been one of the recurring subjects in my art, and in my Matrix works I build images from hundreds of small geometric elements. So I decided to bring these two worlds together — and to answer their question in paint.

I painted every square by hand, one at a time. That mattered to me: the painting looks digital, but nothing about how it was made is.

How every piece is packed

Exploded diagram of the packaging: protective film, bubble wrap, corner protectors, foam padding and the outer shipping box
  1. 1Protective film wrap directly on the canvas
  2. 2Bubble wrap layer
  3. 3Cardboard corner protectors on all four corners
  4. 4Rigid foam padding
  5. 5Outer shipping box