What makes a piece of art iconic? The works of the italian artist Picchiarello, colorful mosaics created with handcrafted and hand-painted wooden blocks, are born with the intention of giving an answer to this question. Growing up in a family environment characterized by passion for contemporary art and music, the artist was influenced by theese two worlds, from which he borrowed some concepts then poured and combined in his works. From the world of art, the most important influence is certainly due to Marcel Duchamp, father of conceptual art: his creed that recited “It is the observer who completes the work” inspired Picchiarello to create something that requires the active involvement of the viewer, and it is from the admiration for Duchamp’s provocative “Mona Lisa” that comes the desire to reinterpret the masterpieces of the past in a fresh key.Instead, from the world of music he borrows the key concept of his works: reflecting on the process of transforming an analog audio track into a compressed digital one (mp3), which basically consists in eliminating some notes from the original track, continuing to “cut” to the limit within which the original song is still perfectly recognizable, the artist sensed the parallelism of this concept with that of Pixel Art (where the original image is fragmented without renouncing its recognizability), thus deciding to use this technique, taking a wooden acoustic panel (here again comes the influence from the world of music) as an inspiration for his medium . The final result is something suspended halfway between sculpture and painting, with a little bit of magic: as the viewer moves away from the work, the colored wooden blocks magically come to life revealing some of the most iconic and famous paintings in the history of art, giving them a new youth in a contemporary key.And finally here is the attempt to answer the initial question: is it not the immediate recognizability of a work that makes it iconic? And what would happen if you tried to deconstruct the image of a famous work? Would its crystallization in the collective imagination be enough to allow the viewer’s gaze to recreate it starting from fragmentary visual informations? The observer will judge.