Save State

Mikaël Aguirre makes paintings out of the specific nostalgia that only video game kids carry—the kind where you don’t just remember the game, you remember who you were while playing it. Yoshi with Baby Mario on his back. Chun-Li and those legs. Sonic tearing through Green Hill Zone with that particular blue-sky-palm-tree paradise that existed nowhere on earth except on a 16-bit cartridge. His work hits because it’s not simple fan service—he finds the emotional register these worlds actually occupied when we were small enough to believe in them completely.

Some of his pieces make me want to just click play and go back in. Not to play the game again, exactly. Just to feel like that again.