This article was originally published on X on July 4, 2025. Join the discussion:
"I just need to talk with the lines," Adria Tormo tells me with a laugh, describing his creative process. The statement might sound absurd, and that's exactly the point. For the Spanish artist known as Tormius, absurdity is freedom disguised as nonsense, method wrapped in madness.
The Boy from Xàtiva
In the small city of Xàtiva, Valencia, a young Adria Tormo drew Pokemon cards and comics like countless other kids. But unlike most, he never stopped chasing that creative spark, even when his surroundings offered little encouragement. "In my family, there's no artistic background. I don't have any family members who are artists or have creative interests."
"Even when I said I wanted to study graphic design, my parents asked, 'Are you sure?'" he recalls. "They thought it wasn't a real career path."
But something inside him persisted, what he describes as an unexplainable force: "Everyone draws during childhood. But for me it was more than that. It was like part of my personality. I don't know how to describe it, but it was something I had inside of me."
Valencia and the Lightning Bolt
Moving to Valencia for graphic design school changed everything. The city, just an hour from Xàtiva by car, might as well have been another planet. Here were galleries, artists, creative communities. An entire ecosystem that validated what had always burned inside him.
"I discovered Felipe Pantone, for example, who's now international. He's also from Valencia and started there doing graffiti," Tormo remembers. "I realized there was a whole world out there on the art side."
But the real revelation came standing before Kandinsky's "Circles in a Circle" during his studies. "I remember exactly where I was and what I felt when I saw the piece. It was like an explosion for me. I thought, 'This is possible? This is art?”
The door that opened that day has never closed. "It was amazing. I remember where I was, what I felt, and thinking 'something is being born here.' I knew I needed to do something with this new perspective."
Chaos and Control
Tormius describes his process as something between meditation and jazz improvisation. He starts with random lines, no plan, just movement. Then comes the ritual: rotating the canvas, flipping it, searching for the moment when abstract marks suddenly whisper their secrets.
"After making random, abstract lines, I rotate and flip the canvas until I find something that speaks to me," he explains. "Maybe I'll see lines that resemble a polar bear, and I'll think, 'I have it. I can see a polar bear in these lines.'"
Music is essential to this process, though not in the way you might expect. "I need background music that won't distract me but will reinforce my energy. When I hear a saxophone solo, I can channel that energy into the lines I'm drawing."
This process reveals the central paradox of Tormius's work: total freedom balanced by rigorous composition. The initial chaos must eventually submit to what he learned in graphic design school. Negative space, visual weight, the invisible architecture that makes a piece "work."
"The lines are very abstract and random, but they need a solid compositional base," he insists. "Even abstract work needs good composition to make sense. Otherwise it falls apart."
From Vectors to "Dirty Work"
For years, Tormius painstakingly translated his sketches into perfect vector graphics. "After many years and pieces, I realized the fun part was the sketching," he admits. "But then I had to export and vectorize on top of the sketch. I was doing each piece twice."
The vectors were clean, precise, technically flawless, and increasingly, a creative prison. "I was obsessed with the perfectionism of connecting every vector perfectly," he explains. The technical demands began bleeding backward into his creative process. When sketching, he'd find himself thinking, "Be careful, you'll need to recreate this line in vectors."
The shift to digital painting (what he calls "dirty work") has unleashed new possibilities. "Now my initial lines are the final lines. I can go crazier because I don't need to redo them." Textures creep in. Happy accidents stay. The work breathes in ways vectors never allowed.
This evolution coincided with his recent "Art of Play" collection, which abandoned vectors entirely. "I'm very satisfied with the results," he says. "I can pursue this direction more deeply because it gives me so much freedom."
The Shapets Universe
Perhaps nothing captures Tormius's playful philosophy better than Shapets, his collection of circular creatures born from a moment of linguistic serendipity. The origin story is pure Tormius: walking around his home, the blockchain project Shape fresh in his mind, playing with words as he often does. "I like playing with words," he explains, "and I had Shape in mind. I was just walking around thinking 'shape, shape...'"
Then inspiration struck: "I don't know how, but the word 'Shapets' just sparked in my mind."
Within a month, 152 characters emerged, each built on Shape's circular logo as a body, each unique in personality. Drawing on his childhood love of Pokemon, as he created the full 620-part Shapets collection, he created types and traits: Nature, Aquatic, Fire, Dragon, Spectral, Poison, Rock, Electric, Steel and Psychic.
The project reveals Tormius at his most whimsical and systematic. "When drawing each Shapet, I'd need to assign it a type. I'd draw one and think, 'This looks ghostly,' so I'd put it in the spectral category."
Beneath the playful surface lies sophisticated world-building. Shapets are released as blind mints. Collectors don't know which one they'll get, becoming explorers discovering new species. "I treat collectors like explorers discovering a new world with species they haven't found yet."
In his mind, it's even more elaborate, touching on science fiction themes that never made it to the official description: "Personally, I imagine collectors arriving on a new world and discovering these species called Shapets. They're all different, and you need to find which ones you'll adopt."
The Paradox of Joy
Here's what strikes me most about Tormius: in a world that often feels heavy, his work radiates genuine joy. The contradiction becomes even more intriguing when he describes himself: "I always wear dark colors or black. I like metal and rock music. I have kind of a dark personality. I’m a huge Joy Division fan."
"I'm sort of a semi-depressive guy," he continues, "You know the vibe, right?"
I do know the vibe. Yet his art explodes with color, playfulness, an almost aggressive optimism. When I ask if he sees his joyful art as an antidote to nihilism or societal apathy, he pauses, really considering it.
" I do pursue a better way of seeing life through my pieces, even if I can't see it that way myself. That's something I need to think about more," he admits. Rather than reflecting his personality, his art might be aspirational, reaching for a lightness he doesn't naturally possess.
"My work isn't a mirror of who I am," he explains. "My themes don't express my personality. Maybe there's something deeper inside me that wants to see the world in this colorful way."
The Writing Dream
Buried in our conversation is another creative ambition, sleeping but not dead. As a teenager, Tormo wanted to be a writer. "I read constantly during my childhood and teens. I wanted to channel my creativity into writing."
The dream hasn't disappeared, it has evolved. Now he imagines a hybrid project: a book inspired by art pieces he collects from other artists. "The idea is to find inspiration in each piece I collect and develop stories that I could print in a book, featuring each artist's work."
He traces this idea to viewing a piece called "Cold Shot" during a Delta Sauce drop: "It showed a person with a gun, probably in a shootout. Something about that piece sparked the idea that I could write a book based on collected pieces." He notes that he tried to collect that piece and may try again to acquire it in the future.
"It's like a sleeping dragon that will eventually wake up, and I'll write something," he says.
Finding His Frequency
The NFT space found Tormius at exactly the right moment. Fresh out of graphic design school, armed with technique but still searching for his voice, he discovered Web3 just two months after graduation. "My career from that point until now has been 100% in this community. This is where I grew up as an artist."
Unlike artists who brought established careers to the blockchain, Tormius was born here. "Some artists were well-known before NFTs, but for me this was the starting point. Starting from zero."
This timing shaped everything. No gallery expectations to meet, no traditional art world hierarchies to navigate. Just a global community hungry for authentic vision. In this space, geometric absurdism wasn't a liability, it was an asset.
The Freedom of Absurdism
As our conversation winds down at 2 AM Valencia time ("I'm a night owl anyway," he assures me), Tormius mentions his evolving artistic identity. He’s trying on "absurdist" for size, attracted to its ultimate creative permission slip.
"If I call myself an absurdist, I can do whatever I want with my pieces without needing explanations. Why did you put that there? I don't know, it's absurd."
He admires artists like Die With The Most Likes, "the peak of absurdism for me, who turns everything into memes, who refuses to take even success seriously.” But Tormius is finding his own flavor of absurdism. Not meme-driven but freedom-focused, not ironic but earnestly playful.
Living the Questions
In a creative landscape often obsessed with recognizable styles and rigid lanes, Tormius offers something refreshing: an artist still discovering himself with each piece. When I ask if spreading joy is a responsibility for artists today, his answer is characteristically thoughtful: "I don't think it's an artist's responsibility. You need to create what you're in the mood to create. When I feel happy and playful, that reflects in my art. When I'm in a bad mood, that reflects too."
Authenticity over assignment. Process over product. The lines will tell you what they want to become, if you learn how to listen.
As he puts it, thinking about each new creation: "You don't know how powerful your work might be or how far it can reach." In that uncertainty lies infinite possibility. In that possibility, perhaps, lies hope.
The geometry of joy isn't about forced happiness or naive optimism. It's about finding freedom in constraints, meaning in chaos, connection across time and space. It's about talking to your lines until they talk back, revealing colorful universes born from the beautiful absurdity of being human.
Tormius suggests these artists for future Weekly Dose of ART features: Muhju, Vestica, and Samantha Cavet. Tormius was recommended by Connor Grasso.