Who is Cydr?

The first images in Cydr’s life didn’t hang on a wall, weren’t viewed in a museum. Instead, they flickered from a CTR TV screen. His father queued up the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek, with Disney filling up the gaps for the young Brazilian kid. Whole weekends were bent around borrowed realms, ones where his mind could roam freely. “I was addicted to disappearing in different worlds,” he told me. “And loved exploring new ones time and time again.” That feeling of access, of another door that opens, has drawn him since; “always looking for places that gave off a sense of endless fantasy.”

When little Cydr wasn’t on the couch, he was outside: skating, playing football, running around with neighborhood kids. However, when his older cousin donated all of his Lego, days were mostly spent inside again. All of a sudden the movies had to compete with building imaginary cities out of colored blocks. No manuals, no predetermined model, but infinite iterations. This feeling of there being no rules mattered a lot: “Lego taught me that form is a decision, not a fate,” he says. It also gave him an early awareness of attention: you can create a world yourself and play inside it as long as you want. This was different then with movies, where the world and the length you’d spend in there was predetermined.

Around the same time, only being six years old, he began tracing drawings on paper to give as gifts to his friends. “When I liked somebody, I wanted to make something for them. So, I’d buy paper and remake figures like Spiderman, or whomever they were a fan of.” It turned out he had a natural knack for it and soon became known as ‘the kid who can draw’. He loved being seen as the best drawer in his class, he admits to me, being honest about a child’s wish to be known for something special. That’s where it all kicked off.

A life lived online

The digital world arrived through a friend’s computer. At the age of nine he fell into RuneScape, so hard that he played for two weeks straight and his mom then rationed his access to one hour a week. “The limit did something interesting,” he reflects. It made the screen feel very special, with the wait sharpening the desire. “Maybe that built my love for digital even more so,” he says.

Another, even bigger, shift came at fourteen, with Photoshop and Call of Duty. He wasn’t a strong player of the game though, so he found a way to be useful within the community: designing banners, avatars, and thumbnails for the small economies that form around games. He laughs about the learning curve. “You know the ‘noise’ filter? I did it dot by dot before finding the slider.” The scene was rough though, full of petty status wars, but he absorbed the unwritten syllabus as much as possible, learning about typographic weight for even the smallest messages, pacing a certain idea – making sure you’re fully behind it, and then the feeling of posting and getting a (negative) reaction. Those lessons stick to his work even now: keep the thought legible, and then push it.

Ripping or transforming?

He rode the earliest crypto art wave with collages: film stills, pop figures, the textures of an online adolescence, posting images on Twitter (now X) that racked up likes and felt hollow after a while. “Am I really making something new?,” he asked himself, “or just ripping older images and putting my credit on top?” He pivoted to Procreate for six or eight months, then returned to Photoshop, where his current artistic language clicked: part drawing, part manipulation, the original kept in view and deliberately stressed until it becomes something else. An early piece – an elderly face he had sketched, then pulled through Photoshop’s distortions – convinced him the experiment had legs. “I hadn’t seen anything quite like it,” he said. “It was raw, and it was mine.”

He would now describe his method as follows: “I transform things. I play with them. I derange them from the original. Familiar, but with a different weight.” The finish line is pragmatic for him: first, do I like looking at this; second, will a viewer who doesn’t know the source have enough to enter? Sometimes he chooses opacity, since he wants people to play with it in their heads, and sometimes he points towards a concept more directly. At the same time, he’s very aware of ‘audience specific’ reactions, an example being a work riffing on Counter-Strike, which made instant sense to gamers and baffled others.

Color bleaching

Color, for Cydr, is a prominent part of the work, exaggerating or leaving it out on purpose. “I’m actually quite color-blind; reds and greens get confused in my mind,” he laughs. Saturation therefore became a tool; by pushing brightness, he can be sure the contrasts hold in his own perception – “and hopefully in yours.” In the fruit works that culminated as New-life, to Still-life, he picked colors as if he were painting the actual taste. Elsewhere he bleaches the image down to black and white – as with the mugshots, where the point is to borrow the authority of the archive.

The first impulse for that series of mugshots came from a study on perception: he stretched a Bella Hadid image into three bodies – very thin, widened, very large – as a comment on the way a phone can betray you. Zoomed and processed, the face snapped into the grammar of a booking photo. “It was funny and a bit cruel,” he said, and the cruel part is important. Where the rest of his work can court indie-bright pleasure, mugshots refuses this and asks a colder question: what does it mean to ‘dress’ a celebrity in the visual language of guilt?

The religious image guidance makes a different kind of collision. Jesus holds out the red and the blue pill – the Matrix choice reiterated as a devotional fork. Cydr wasn’t hunting for blasphemy while creating it; he was just curious about how two belief systems behave when you force them into the same frame. That curiosity runs through his entire practice. For him, distortion is not about vandalism. Instead, he uses it more as oral history: “the idea of passing a story through a thousand mouths and the last copy won’t match the first.”

A walk in the park

Looking at his life until now, the influences of Cydr’s works are not all inherited from the online world (of movies, games, personas like celebrities that you only get to ‘know’ through a screen). For years, his days were structured by university and long, quiet evenings. Then came an office job in Brazilian e-commerce – selling rugs, mirrors, (garden) furniture, and the likes of this. Nine hours on the clock, twelve hours house-to-house. This is his new and current timetable, that has changed his practice and how he looks – feeling how his free time has become more special and wanting to make the most out of it. It seems to come back to his early RuneScape time limit.

He walks more, notices more, and takes his cues from ordinary objects he used to ignore – literally trying to soak up everything. At the same time, he has been experimenting with AI to repair and stage product images for work, which has a funny way of collapsing categories: the studio and the office talk to each other through the same software now. Therefore it’s not surprising he keeps circling ‘mundane’ subjects: fruit, fish, bureaucratic portraits, dressing them in a ‘charge’ they don’t usually receive. We joke about making a series on rugs. In crypto, the pun writes itself.

Music is another quiet driver. The artist keeps a playlist of more than two thousand tracks and lets shuffle decide the mood. “The first five songs can actually change what I’m making,” he says. The range is wide: rock, R&B, electronic, pop or ‘elevator music’. “It can make a piece move from calm to agitation inside the frame.” Besides that, recent viewings matter too. Cydr immediately mentions Pluto, the anime in which robots start to look unmistakably human to themselves, and the austere futurism of Akira and Ghost in the Shell. The artist builds on the atmosphere of these pictures, and if you watch closely, you might feel the afterimage of these worlds in Cydr’s art.

Tongue-in-cheek

What about the name? It turns out that even the artist’s alien is an artifact of the culture that formed him. Years ago a friend – “who is a hacker, he laughs” – recovered an abandoned four-letter account from a giveaway bot and sold it to him. “It basically chose me,” Cydr says. “The fit felt neat – the handle is short, catchy, a little opaque, and most importantly: shaped by the economies of games and platforms,” he explains. And so is his work: built from found structures, optimized for ‘perceiving’ at multiple distances and through multiple lenses, conveying the idea that images don’t live in isolation anymore.

And coming next up? Expect toggles between grayscale severity and candy-bright saturation, between ‘a wink’ and ‘a straight face’, between public people or symbols and the extremely ordinary. Expect Cydr to keep testing the hinge where recognition becomes reinterpretation, and expect the subject list to stay deceptively simple – food, faces, maybe a chair of some sorts – because what he’s really chasing is not novelty, but that second look: the moment you know exactly what you’re seeing and feel, unmistakably, that something has shifted. “Familiar,” he says, “but with a different weight.” That’s Cydr, and he’s pleased to meet you too.