Cydrism: Memory Glitch and the Poetics of Distortion
There’s something deeply funny and deeply sad in Cydr’s work—but the line between those feelings is never clearly drawn. The Brazilian artist’s digital illustrations and collages live in a space that feels familiar but off, like a memory warped by a low-resolution dream. Nothing is quite what it was. Everything’s been touched, stretched, copied, shifted. A body becomes a blur. A path becomes a question. A passport becomes a love object.
Cydr’s style—if it can be called one—is defined more by instinct than by rule. He refers to it jokingly as Cydrism, a word that captures both the refusal to categorize and the sense that what he’s doing is singular. It’s remix, yes, but not just of form—it’s a remix of feeling. Each image seems to come from somewhere you’ve been before, but not quite. It’s nostalgia bent through a Photoshop warp tool. It’s humor with a hangover. Aesthetic as emotional residue.
What binds Cydr’s work isn’t medium, color, or structure. It’s that subtle shift—the tilt that makes you pause.
gibbon’s skeleton
“similar to that one tall friend.”
This piece is deceptively simple: a long, lanky figure stands in an icy digital void, stretched out and stylized into anatomical absurdity. It’s funny. The title itself is a joke—“that one tall friend.” But the humor doesn’t undercut the weight of the image—it deepens it. The figure doesn’t appear distressed or deformed; it simply is. A little wrong. A little right. Suspended in a moment of strange poise.
The distortion in gibbon’s skeleton evokes a kind of digital caricature, but with the eerie stillness of early 3D renders. There’s no environment, no action, no punchline—just the presence of the altered body. It calls to mind the spatial oddity of Francis Bacon’s figures, but filtered through the plastic smoothness of a game engine prototype. A meme before it knows it’s a meme.
Like much of Cydr’s work, it’s not about the joke. It’s about what the joke almost hides.
guidance
“the path you take.”
In guidance, the palette darkens, and the tone shifts from playful to cryptic. A quasi-religious figure gestures with both hands, suspended in a matrix of distortion and glow. The posture recalls saints or prophets—but this isn’t stained glass. This is rendered mythology. The figure is part illustration, part collage, part digital phantom. Its hands offer contrasting paths: one with meat, one with abstraction. The choice is clear, or not.
There’s humor in this too, but it’s buried in sincerity. guidance isn’t mocking belief—it’s updating it. The divine here is layered and pixelated. It stutters. It asks for your devotion, but doesn’t promise clarity.
The piece functions like an AI-generated vision of worship. Not cold, but uncertain. A god glitched. A path illuminated by something that may or may not be benevolent.
in love with my passport
“this is a future old memory.”
in love with my passport returns to saturated color and the feel of physical material. It’s a digital postcard from a place that doesn’t exist yet—but feels like it once did. Layers of texture, architectural fragments, and emotional cues swirl into a travel narrative without a location. A suitcase, a building, a blue sky—but all smudged, scuffed, scrolled.
The title delivers the punch: this isn’t just about travel. It’s about longing for movement, for newness, for an identity that isn’t anchored to a single place or screen. It’s romantic, but with melancholy edges. The passport is both freedom and escape, both symbol and artifact.
This work echoes the spirit of Tracey Emin or Felix Gonzalez-Torres—not in form, but in emotional honesty. It’s about what we carry, and what we leave behind when we chase the self in motion. This is nostalgia for something that hasn’t ended yet.
crisp
“final cook.”
If gibbon’s skeleton is funny and passport is sad, crisp is something else entirely. It’s feral. Saturated reds, greasy textures, overexposed surfaces—a still life that feels like it’s actively decaying in front of you. What looks like a roasted pig’s head—or maybe a hallucinated meat sculpture—sits at the center of the composition, glossy and grotesque.
There’s no irony here. No visual joke. crisp confronts the viewer with excess. It is decadent, disgusting, and hypnotic. A ritual meal from a world where food is rendered, not cooked. The title—“final cook”—suggests that this is the endpoint of transformation. There’s nothing left to do but consume.
Sold recently for 0.6942 ETH in a curated auction, crisp feels like the logical escalation of Cydr’s technique. Not playful interference, but full-blown confrontation. The distortion is no longer gentle. It’s force-fed.
And yet… it’s beautiful. Because in Cydr’s world, even ruin has polish.
Conclusion: The Slant of the Familiar
What makes Cydr’s work powerful is how easy it is to miss. At first glance, it’s funny, weird, casual. But spend time with it and the images start to haunt you. Because they’re not really new—they’re just new angles on things you already know. A friend, a ritual, a dream of leaving.
Cydr isn’t building new worlds. He’s nudging the current one slightly out of frame. Just enough to make you feel the glitch.
It’s not unrecognizable. It’s just heavier than it looks.
That’s Cydrism.
