Marco Melgrati is an Italian illustrator who turns everyday habits into small visual jokes with a sting in the tail. A phone becomes a reflecting pool for a modern Narcissus, a politician turns out to be a puppet hanging from a barcode, and a couple hugging each other are really hugging their screens. The fifteen pictures gathered here date from the mid-2010s, when his work spread widely on social media, and they still read as a sharp, compact commentary on how we live now.
What makes these images work is a single swap. Melgrati takes a familiar object or symbol and puts it where something else should be: a "like" button where a crowd of followers should be, a gravestone cross where a logo ends. Once you spot the swap, the point lands in a second. Below, each illustration has a short note on what it shows and the question it raises, so you can look first and read after.
Who Marco Melgrati is and how he works
Melgrati describes himself as a freelance illustrator from Milan. In a 2021 interview with Design You Trust he said he works mostly in Photoshop and Painter, drawing digitally so he can meet tight deadlines and work for clients anywhere. Those clients include magazines, newspapers and websites, which explains the editorial feel of his pictures: each one has to make its point at thumbnail size, next to a headline.
He has also lived the restless, connected life his pictures poke at. In the same interview he said that since 2016 he had moved between countries including Thailand, Mexico and Colombia as a digital nomad, with Vilnius in Lithuania as his official base. When these illustrations first circulated in 2016 he was based in Mexico City.
His style sits in a tradition of visual satire alongside artists such as Paweł Kuczyński and Igor Morski: flat, calm colour, very few elements, and a twist that you notice a moment after the first glance. The calm look is part of the trick. Nothing screams, so the viewer does the work of noticing.
Love and attention in the age of screens
Could Be Love
Two young people sit facing each other on a train, one scrolling a phone and the other reading a tablet. In the window behind them, their reflections are kissing. The picture is about the meeting that never happens because both people are somewhere else, and it captures a feeling many commuters will recognise.
Through Love
A couple holds each other close, but each partner is looking at a phone over the other's shoulder. The embrace is real; the attention is not. It is one of Melgrati's gentlest images, and one of the most uncomfortable, because it shows a habit most of us have caught ourselves in.
Love Your Enemies
Two hands raise the most insulting gesture there is, and the fingertips meet to form a small red heart. The illustration turns an old religious instruction into a visual paradox: hostility and affection made out of the same gesture. It can be read as hope, or as a joke about how hard that commandment is to keep.
Social media, vanity and influence
Social Media Narcissism
In the Greek myth, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and wasted away beside it. Here the pool is a giant smartphone and a young man leans over its screen, captivated by himself. The image needs no caption for anyone who has spent too long checking how a selfie looks.
Vanity
A skeleton in a red bra strikes a pose and takes a selfie. It updates the old "vanitas" theme of European painting, where skulls reminded viewers that beauty and life are brief. Melgrati's version asks what all the posing is for, if the body underneath is the same for everyone.
Use It Better
A glamorous blonde figure walks away from the viewer, and her backside is drawn as a human brain. The joke works in two directions: a culture that rewards looks over thinking, and a body that seems to be carrying its mind in the wrong place. The title is the punchline, a nudge to use what is up top.
Opinion Leaders and Influencers
A figure in a feathered cap plays a pipe, and a swarm of thumbs-up "like" icons follows him through the sky. It is the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who in the folk tale led the town's children away with his music. The update is pointed: online, followers can be led just as easily, one click at a time.
The Death of Privacy
The lowercase "f" of Facebook's logo stretches down until its crossbar becomes a white grave cross. Melgrati drew it at a time of rising concern over how social networks collect personal data, two years before the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 made that concern front-page news.
Work, money and power
It's Time to Quit Your Job
Office workers sit in a honeycomb of yellow cubicles, each bent over a computer like a bee in its cell. At the top, one small figure has climbed out and walks off into open space. It is a picture of the urge to escape routine work, and of how few people actually do.
Financial Power and Politics
A politician speaks from a lectern, but he is a marionette: his strings run up to a barcode. The message is that money, not voters, moves the speaker. Whatever your politics, it is a compact way to raise the question of who funds campaigns and what they expect in return.
From Communism to Capitalism
A hammer and sickle, the symbol of the Soviet Union, is cut out of a red background, and tiny human figures appear beside and on top of it. The image comments on the move from planned economies to market economies after the Cold War, and on how ordinary people were left to find their footing in between.
War, religion and the end of the world
The Hard Way Out of Afghanistan
A helmeted soldier crawls out through a hole in a wall shaped like the map of Afghanistan. When this was drawn, foreign troops had been in the country for well over a decade; the final US withdrawal came in August 2021, chaotic and followed by the return of the Taliban. In hindsight the picture looks almost prophetic about how hard leaving would be.
War Is Closer Than You Think
A man sits in his flat looking at a small framed picture of a fighter jet, as if war were just an image on a screen. Outside the window, the same jet is firing a missile towards the city. The illustration is about the distance we feel from conflicts we only watch, and how quickly that distance can disappear.
A Fatal Addiction: War in the Name of God
An old man with a halo and a white beard kneels on the globe, moving toy tanks, soldiers and planes as if playing a board game. The image criticises wars fought in the name of religion, by showing how absurd it is to imagine any god directing them like a child with toys.
2012 Theories: End of the World
The same haloed figure leans over a billiard table, cue in hand, lining up a shot that will send the Earth into a pocket. It mocks the 2012 doomsday panic, which was based on a misreading of the Maya calendar. NASA and archaeologists said at the time that nothing in that calendar predicted the end of anything, and 21 December 2012 passed quietly.
How to read satirical illustration
Melgrati's pictures are short, but they reward a slower look. A simple method helps with any satirical drawing:
- Find the swap. Ask what object is sitting where something else belongs: a screen in place of a pool, a barcode in place of a puppeteer.
- Name the claim. Put the point into one plain sentence, such as "money controls politicians". Seeing it in words makes it easier to judge.
- Test it. Satire exaggerates on purpose. Ask where the claim is fair and where it oversimplifies. Not every couple with phones is drifting apart, and not every politician is bought.
- Look at yourself. The best of these images work because the viewer recognises a habit of their own. That small jolt is the reason editorial illustration still matters.
Images like these do not stop wars or delete apps. What they can do is make a familiar habit look strange for a moment, which is often where a change of behaviour starts. If one of these pictures made you put your phone down at dinner, it has done its job.
You can follow Marco Melgrati's newer work on Instagram.
Sources: Illustrations by Marco Melgrati, all rights his; Design You Trust: interview with Marco Melgrati (2021); Marco Melgrati on Instagram; first collected by Bored Panda.
For a further example of symbolic commentary on contemporary habits, explore Marco Melgrati's Illustrations Question Modern Habits.
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- Powerful Satirical Illustrations Show What War Really Looks Like
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- How French Artists in 1899 Imagined Life in the Year 2000
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