Sylvan Lionno

While some people may be talented at reading between the lines, Sylvan Lionni excels at painting inside them. The Brit-born, Brooklyn-based artist breathes new life into the seemingly mundane world of forms and diagrams by injecting them with lively and meaningful color schemes. His painstakingly perfect renderings of stadiums and arena seating charts take into account elements such as size, shape, symmetry and color coupled with cultural meaning as they "chart democracy and class structure by its leisure events, and to coax the entire social organism out of the flat serenity of a seating chart", proving there's more to charts and graphs than meets the eye. Though computers are certainly involved in the design of his pieces, it's Lionni's adept touch with the brush that's responsible for turning something that just would normally seem to be "there" into a deeper subject matter.