Between Chaos and Control: A Brazilian Artist’s Journey in Tel Aviv
Lucas Sylos is a Brazilian-born artist currently based in Tel Aviv, where his life and work have taken on new meaning through the experience of living between cultures, uncertainty, and constant transformation.
Born and raised in São Paulo, Sylos’s first connection with visual expression did not come from museums, but from everyday life. Television, posters, graffiti, and music were part of his visual world from an early age. At the same time, more intimate influences shaped his path, such as watching his grandmother play piano and being introduced to painting and drawing by his aunt. Drawing quickly became a natural way for him to understand and navigate the world.
Over the years, his path moved through different disciplines, including painting, fashion design, and tattooing. Each of these experiences contributed to his current artistic language, especially his strong focus on line, precision, and repetition. Today, his work is primarily created using black ink on paper and canvas, where he builds abstract compositions through layers of lines.
For Sylos, art does not begin with a clear image or idea. Instead, it emerges through the act of drawing itself. Lines accumulate, intersect, and disperse, creating structures that reflect movement, emotion, and internal states. His work exists in the tension between chaos and control, where spontaneous gestures meet careful repetition. Rather than representing something external, his drawings capture moments of presence, recording the flow of thought, sensation, and time.
His relationship with art is also deeply personal. Living with depression, bipolarity, and anxiety has shaped how he experiences focus, repetition, and attention. Drawing is one of the few activities that never exhausts him. In the studio, the act of drawing becomes a space where emotions can be processed without needing to be explained. Each line becomes part of that process, turning internal experiences into visual form.
The move from Brazil to Israel marked a significant turning point in both his life and work. Living between two countries, cultures, and realities created a constant sense of transition. Questions of belonging, distance, and identity became part of his daily experience. This duality is reflected in his work through contrasts between density and openness, tension and pause, expansion and restraint.
This connection between life and art became even more evident during recent periods of conflict in Israel. In a recent and ongoing series, Between Sirens and Kindness, Sylos reflects on the experience of living under uncertainty, where fear and everyday life coexist. While sirens and alerts became part of reality, so did small moments of normalcy: people meeting for coffee, walking their dogs, sharing meals. His work does not depict war directly, but captures the emotional atmosphere of this coexistence between anxiety and resilience.
Another important body of work, Migrant Roots, explores the experience of leaving Brazil and building a new life in Israel. Through abstract compositions, the series reflects the process of adapting to a new environment while holding onto one’s identity. Each piece represents a stage in this ongoing transformation.
In Pulse Compression, Sylos responds to a different kind of pressure — the challenge of creating original work in a world saturated with images, artificial intelligence, and constant production. By working on a smaller scale, he creates intense compositions where each line carries more weight, emphasizing the uniqueness of the human gesture.
Across all his work, one idea remains constant: art as a way of understanding and processing experience. His drawings are not about representing the world, but about navigating it. They reflect a reality where emotions, memories, and perspectives overlap, and where balance is not something fixed, but something continuously negotiated.
Today, Sylos continues to develop his work in Tel Aviv, participating in exhibitions and artistic projects in Israel and internationally. His practice remains grounded in drawing as an intense and immersive process, where each line carries the weight of a specific moment and cannot be replicated.
Rather than offering fixed meanings, his work invites individual interpretation. Each viewer encounters the compositions in a different way, responding to their own emotions, memories, and perceptions. The same piece can evoke calm, tension, or curiosity, depending on who is looking. In this sense, the work remains open, shifting, and alive, shaped not only by the artist’s gesture but also by the experience of the viewer.
Follow Lucas Sylos’s work:
Portfolio: Lucas Sylos Artist Portfolio
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D4eaofhztyfEEANzOZAYsJIi9KIPlSVs/view?usp=sharing
Instagram: @sylos.art
https://www.instagram.com/sylos.art?igsh=bjBibXY4b2s4aWF4
