Arlo Sinclair 'Pacman: Pills & Ghosts' Print Available

Artist: Arlo Sinclair
Title: Pacman: Pills & Ghosts
Medium: Framed Hand Painted Real Floppy Disk
Size: 29 x 29 x 5 cm
Edition: 20
Prices: $425

  

Arlo Sinclair (b. 1980, South Africa) is a London-based painter who swapped code for canvas, transforming a childhood shaped by economic hardship and 1980s arcade addiction into wry, pixel-perfect oil paintings that mourn and celebrate obsolete tech. Self-taught after a career in computer programming, he treats magneto-digital storage floppy disks, VHS sleeves, early game cartridges as modern relics, rendering their scuffs, labels and corporate typography with Old-Master precision and a satirist’s grin. Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Top Gun, JAWS, Space Invaders, Pokemon and more have all been covered by his floppy disk design style.

Each composition blends nostalgia with critique: stripes of corrupted data become abstract color fields, while brand logos float like devotional icons, inviting viewers to confess their geek nostalgia and question planned obsolescence. Sculptural detours see Sinclair cast vintage Hot Wheels in bronze or embed circuit boards in resin, turning playroom trophies into luxury artifacts that taunt the art market’s own appetite for retro chic.

Since debuting in 2016 he has sold out editions at Woolff Gallery, Guy Hepner, Toxic Arts, and Artsy, while critics hail him as “the IT department’s Van Dyck” for the way he marries impasto paint with binary exactitude. Whether depicting a cracked AOL CD or a CRT screen mid-explosion, Sinclair’s work insists that the digital ghosts we archive in attics deserve the same reverence society reserves for marble busts proof that memory, like hardware, is always one click away from crashing.