What was your path to illustration?
I chose illustration because it’s a more efficient means that best meets my needs. It allows me to be free from canonical constraints and offers me an indefinite support on which I can rely without too many expectations, a sort of organized chaos. Lately, I’ve been discovering a strong connection with details inside this synthesis.
What style or technique influenced or influences your work?
I work digitally, on a phantom support, it helps me to abstract myself and to disconnect from the present. Graphic dynamism has always had a strong impact on me, the strength that the immediate simplicity of a line emits puts me in a sort of a peaceful trance. My real passion, though, are the shapes of Eroticity, which have always hypnotized me since childhood. Understanding and translating them into my imagery was a long and tiring job.
Is the place you were born reflected in your work?
I have always tried to separate myself from my belongings, which reflects in my work. I remember drawing my first female nude at ten, my parents discovered it and made me feel uneasy about it. They had involuntarily deprived me of something that I later discovered was very dear to me.
Sexuality in my artworks has become a kind of therapy that tries to reconnect me to my nature and the freedom of bodies without censorship of any kind.
From where do you source your inspiration?
Like many others, from delusions, exual fantasies, boredom and drugs (the light ones, don’t worry, I’m fine 😉 ).
WIDE-FORMAT ILLUSTRATION /
Dancing Through You
Long Neck Boy
BIO / Mirko Conte AKA Micro Tenko (1992) is an illustrator currently living in Milan, Italy, working with digital techniques. Regarding his works, he claims: “I create illustrations that celebrate and represent everything that turns me on and leaves a hole inside me.”