"Night Is Mystical": Làzaro's Dreampunk Anemoia

By @JustinWetch

When you ask Làzaro to describe his work, he hesitates and then lands on something stranger than the standard artist sentence.

"More than realities," he says, "they are like memories from lives that you haven't lived."

He builds neon-soaked cities at night with a single figure standing in a window or on a balcony, watching the sprawl below. The cities are clearly futures. The emotional register is clearly past. Look at one for long enough and you start feeling nostalgic for a life you never had.

There's a word for this. The Greek word is anemoia, and it means feeling nostalgic for something you haven't lived through. Làzaro found the word years into making his work and recognized it immediately as a name for what he'd been chasing.

"It's like looking at memories from a life that I could have lived," he says, "but I have forgotten."

That's the whole project. Not science fiction. Not concept art. Anemoia rendered in Blender. The rest of this piece is about how a thirty-something paralegal in Milan figured out how to make a feeling like that and persuade thousands of strangers to recognize it as their own.

Làzaro grew up in Milan and never left. Middle-class family, classical schools, piano and guitar he was never very good at. The childhood wasn't dramatic. What mattered was the city.

He's still trying to describe what Milan does to a person. He keeps circling it.

"It's almost like a drop falling into the ocean," he says, trying to name the feeling of being one of millions of unique stories moving past each other every second and almost none of them being heard. A city is full of life and also, somehow, the opposite of life. "It should be the opposite of life, being all concrete and steel and artificial. But it's also full of movement, colors, ideas, thoughts."

He pauses. Apologizes for his English. Then lands the line that captures it.

"To me, it's like the definition of something that's alive."

Every contradiction in his work traces back here. The cozy moment placed inside the hostile environment. The single figure in the megacity. The strange way a place can be teeming and lonely at the same time. He didn't have to invent any of that. He grew up inside it.

The path to 3D wasn't direct. He started DJing at sixteen, moved into music production, and eventually earned a bachelor's in audio engineering. He worked in audio for about a year. Then his family's law firm hit a rough patch and he had to step up. He spent the next stretch of his life as a paralegal.

The music kept going on the side. The audio engineering training turned out to matter more than the music ever did, because it taught him how to learn complex software. Every audio production package shares structural DNA with every other one, and once you've taught yourself one, you've taught yourself the muscle for teaching yourself any of them.

COVID arrived. He spent more time on socials. He stumbled across the early wave of 3D artists, and one of them was Dangiuz.

"I remember being absolutely blown away when I saw that stuff," Làzaro says. He realized he could make worlds himself. He picked up Blender.

When I asked him how he bridged the gap between the law office and the studio, he laughed.

"You don't bridge the gap," he said. "You basically are a paralegal by day and an artist by night."

The signature move in Làzaro's work is so consistent it's almost a rule. He places a single small figure somewhere quiet inside a vast hostile city. The figure is doing nothing in particular. Standing at a window after waking up. Looking out over a balcony at the distant skyline. Sitting in a corner room while the megastructure churns outside. The figure is intimate. The city is alien. Both are necessary.

"I like the contrast," he says, "between a cozy moment and surrounding it with this chaotic, impossible mega reality that's menacing in a way. It shouldn't feel cozy. It's wrong. But not in a bad way."

This is the formal mechanism that makes the anemoia work. The simple human moment, waking up, looking out a window, is the same in every era. Strip the megacity away and you'd just be looking at someone's morning. It's the dystopian frame around the moment that turns the moment into a memory. The cozy gesture becomes legible as something remembered rather than something happening.

The lonely figure carries the second half of the trick. Drop a person into a city of fifty million and they're a drop in the ocean. Looking at one of his pieces, you don't see a protagonist. You see yourself, or a version of yourself, or someone who could have been you. When Elon Musk signal-boosted one of his pieces last year, the replies split between people moved by it and people angry at it ("there's no nature, that's a bad future, I don't wanna live there"). Làzaro found the anger interesting. The anger was also a form of recognition. Either way, you were inside the picture.

Almost of his work is nocturnal. It has to be.

"Night is mystical," he says. "It really helps bringing alive these moments. The nostalgic element also comes from them being placed at night."

There's a technical argument too. Daytime locks you into natural light. Night opens the whole color palette. Neons, sodium streetlamps, lit windows in distant towers, holographic advertising. The night palette is electric and chromatic in a way the sun never permits. Color, for Làzaro, is most of the emotional work. He starts every piece with a single base color, almost always a saturated blue, and then sketches out the bright and dark zones to drive the eye. After that, he adds accent colors against the blue: red, orange, green, placed deliberately, never decorative.

"It's almost like a continuous dance of shapes and colors until you find the right balance."

Blender does almost everything. He estimates ninety-five percent of any given piece is built inside it. DaVinci and After Effects handle color grading and post. Ableton runs the audio. He listens to music while he builds because the music focuses the emotion he's trying to convey, and as the piece takes shape, the right soundtrack reveals itself. Sometimes he's making a moody nighttime city. Sometimes he's making a romantic one. The music tells him which.

The titles take as long as the artwork. He's said this directly, and he doesn't seem to find it strange. The image isn't done until it's been named.

He coined the genre because the existing vocabulary didn't fit. The iconography is cyberpunk: neon, megastructures, rain-slicked streets, the visual lineage that runs through Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell and Akira and Cyberpunk 2077. But cyberpunk as a genre is about menace, alienation, dystopia. Làzaro isn't making menace. He's making dream.

"Just like dreams," he says, "when you're inside a dream, you feel like you're actually living that moment, even though it's not real."

So: dream plus punk. Dreampunk.

The gaming influence runs deep here too: Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, RDR2, Elden Ring to name a few. What he wants from his still images is what those games give you for forty hours: not a story you watch but a story you inhabit. The viewer takes an active journey through the frame, not a passive look at it.

The inversion is what makes the work distinct from everything else in the cyberpunk lineage. He's making images of futures, but they function as memories of pasts. Time collapses inside the frame. The work doesn't matter as prophecy. It doesn't matter as critique. It matters as a feeling you didn't realize you remembered.

What he wishes more people understood is that there's depth under what can look at a glance like a tech demo.

"There's more than just cool looking animations to it."

Làzaro is working on a space series next. He recently finished a piece called "How do you let go of the past?", set inside a commercial rocket shooting into space, and the rest of the series will extend from there. Anemoia at civilizational scale. Memories from futures we haven't lived yet. He's also trying to weave more nature elements into his urban scenes, partly because some collectors have been wishing for it, partly because the contradiction between the artificial and the organic interests him.

Làzaro shouts out his early collectors: @Klutch_NFT, Dangiuz, exolorian, and @artguy_eth.

Artists inspiring him lately: Dangiuz, @abeastinside, and @ashthorp, a long-time inspiration he calls crazy in the best sense.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @lazaro45ive recommends @Dangiuz, @exolorian, and @Visual_Salman.