How did I get here?

I started painting walls at 13.
By 25, I was a photorealistic muralist at my peak — big facades, big budgets, big scaffolding.

And I walked away.

Money:
Someone once showed me 50k in cash and had no idea what to do with it. No leverage, no time, still grinding. That was my future if I stayed: high effort, low freedom, no system.

Body:
One near-accident on a scaffold, one spray can dropped from 20 feet with no helmets on. I realised: my body is my most precious asset, and I was gambling it for day rates and "cool pictures."

Head:
I was usually half-numb — parties, social media, constant noise. Bad input, bad output. Then COVID came, killed the mural jobs, and I turned into a ghost. No marketing, no system, no plan.

At the same time I joined an entrepreneurship scholarship and started therapy.
Art school at HFBK Dresden taught me how to think and practice.
It did not teach me how to ship, sell, or survive.

I've always been caught in other people's emotions. Since I was a kid I cared more about the feeling in front of me than my own. That's what emotional debt feels like: being like an effervescent tablet, dissolving into the needs and moods of others.

So when I started thinking "startup," of course I landed on emotions. Startup, in my head, meant: do something big, scalable — factory-scale. And I already knew what it feels like to be a human turned into an emotional factory.

So I did the only honest thing I could think of: I imagined a way to bring that factory outside — in paint, metal, code, and visitors — to mirror the one inside me. So you and I could watch it run, reflect on it, and try to learn what it means to live in a time where our feelings are the raw material.

Through a side project on loneliness — handwritten letters at scale — we found a way to use a robot to write for us. The startup died, but the robot stayed. Thanks to my mentor Hans from YETI Dresden, the machine ended up with me at HfBK.

I didn't build the robot. I didn't code it. What I did was repurpose it: from writing letters to painting feelings. From studio practice to prototyping systems. From "more art" to category design — turning a social-media algorithm, a marketing funnel, and a sales process into an art object.

Social media, my lifelong obsession with emotion, painting since childhood, the robot as a tool, and the chance to finally do my diploma at HFBK Dresden — all of it collapsed into one room.

Emotional Capital is that room.

It's a self-portrait of a human being turned into an emotional factory. It's a portrait of a social-media algorithm, live, with paint instead of pixels. It's a portrait of marketing and sales, rolled up into an artwork: offer, funnel, lead magnet, product, delivery video — all presented as "art."

People consumed, used, and reflected on the work exactly as intended. I felt the power of leverage — and I felt as burnt out as my "franchisees," the visitors whose emotions I harvested while they consumed me.

I turned emotions into cash. I felt dirty for building a system that efficient. But it was the only honest way I knew to show what our time looks like — to me, and maybe to you.

That's what Emotional Capital is: a portrait of our time, drawn with my own operating system.

And the machine is still running.

I took my weird mix of muralist, art student, entrepreneurship scholarship kid, therapy, and robots — and turned it into one coherent system on paper before I ever hung a diploma show.

I sat down and drafted a catalogue: a 72-page blueprint of the full system. That document defined the method, the money model, the category. On the back of it I raised business-angel money and then printed 1,000 copies, which I gave away for free inside the Oktogon at HFBK Dresden.

In the process I accidentally invented my own painting method: MonoSerieⁿ — a serial-unique painting system. Every time the robot paints the "same" image, it comes out slightly different. Like emotions: deeply personal, even though they follow recognisable patterns. Smile, laugh, cry — you know the template, but it's never identical.

By gluing the system together end-to-end, I shifted my status from labourer to system designer. I spent 16+ months hanging out with this robot, prototyping, refining, writing the catalogue, then stress-testing the whole thing in Emotional Capital: five days of max output, 2,300 pieces, and a full gallery show produced in days, not months.

It was a hardcore bootcamp in leverage and category design.
It changed how I see ideas, work, and what an "art practice" can be.
And it's still the period of my life I'm most grateful for.

This is how Leonⁿ became a leveraged artist — finally a leveraged worker.

I stopped fighting my life as a "starving artist" and switched my fight: from suffering for art to becoming a SystematicArtistⁿ.

A SystematicArtistⁿ consciously:

• designs leverage instead of trading hours
• orchestrates tools, people, and processes instead of doing everything by hand
• builds systems that produce work, proof, and income even when they're not in the room

Emotional Capital was the proof of concept for ArtisticLeverageⁿ: paint, robot, pricing engine, catalogue, visitors, sales funnel — all carefully designed into one system.

That's the difference: not just making art anymore. Designing systems that make art, money, and meaning at the same time.

I make things visible.