Cydr

Born in 2002, Cydr began drawing, painting, and sculpting as a child before discovering digital art through a school Photoshop class. His early engagement with science-fiction films, with games like RuneScape and Call of Duty, and with internet culture and online communities in general, provided a (technical) knowledge in different ‘computer’ styles, compositions, and typographies from a young age.

After experimenting with collages, his style evolved towards a process that blends readymades, popular imagery, digital drawing, manipulation, and distortion in software such as Photoshop and Procreate. He doesn’t appropriate his source material, but he deranges it, holding the original in view while deliberately shifting it until it accrues new weight and resonance. This results in works that feel both like illustrations and documentations.

For Cydr, distortion is a very conceptual gesture: an attempt to convey how images of people, stories, culture, and experiences morph as they circulate.

This interest surfaces in works that juxtapose cultural symbols with mundane subjects, imbuing both with a charge that prompts viewers to reconsider what they thought they knew.

Color in his work functions as an expressive variable. Acknowledging that his own perception of shades is sometimes off – such as confusion between reds and greens – he uses saturation and contrast very pragmatically to ensure that the visual grammar of his images remains legible to himself and, by extension, to others.