Gio Mariani is a Brazilian graphic and motion designer, illustrator and pixel artist based in the Netherlands.Working mainly in pixel art, they build hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animated loops populated by small spirit-like beings inspired by the sootballs from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Their compositions layer several parallel stories at once, a way of processing their own emotions and anxiety.
Mariani began making illustrations in their free time after starting a graphic design degree in 2013, and turned to pixel art at the end of 2020. A friend encouraged them to try NFTs and helped set up an account on Hic et Nunc, where they began minting. Most of their work has since sold within the Tezos community, which they describe as inspiring and tight-knit. They consider pocket dimensions a favorite piece, the first in which they explored the layered, multi-world compositions that became central to their practice. Their most extended narrative work is the bog body, a collaboration with the artist Phosphor developed over weeks of research.
In 2024 the film O artista-mãe documented Mariani's creative relationship with their mother, Zilda, and the making of the exhibition “Sobre minha mãe” at the Victor Meirelles Museum in Florianópolis, Brazil. The exhibition, which opened on April 23, 2024, showed paintings, photographs and objects the pair made between 2019 and 2022 from discarded medicine leaflets, blister packs and packaging, materials tied to Zilda's experience of Alzheimer's. Zilda also showed her own works in the exhibition, made between 2008 and 2017.
