Cyril Kanavathi is a self-taught Malaysian artist working across painting and street photography. He began his artistic journey as a painter, experimenting with a range of mediums to cultivate a distinctive voice. In 2006, his photography gained widespread recognition when he was named “Photographer of the Month” by a prominent Malaysian photography magazine, establishing him as a notable visual storyteller early in his career.
As a painter, Cyril works with ink as a living force—fluid, immediate, and irretrievable. Each painting becomes an encounter between gesture and silence, where movement transforms into language and emotion assumes form. Through layered strokes and shifting tonal fields, his work traces the inner weather of thought and sensation, capturing the tension between control and surrender. Rather than depict the world, his paintings reveal the energy of becoming—marks that record a fleeting state of being. Influenced by philosophies of presence and impermanence, Cyril treats abstraction as a space for reflection, inviting the viewer to sense, rather than interpret. The work does not aim to offer answers; instead, it opens a field of experience where chaos, clarity, and breath coexist.
cyril kanavathi 