Michael Reeder, on Instagram @reederone, builds portraits that seem to live on the edge between reality and abstraction. Hyper-realistic faces dissolve into flat geometries, fields of vivid color, and shapes that turn them into visual enigmas. It’s a language born from skate culture and graffiti writing, filtered through academic painting, and refined into a code able to speak about identity in a direct, universal way.

The figures that inhabit Michael Reeder’s imagination are never just faces, but mirrors of a fragmented ego: patches of skin coexist with skeletons, shadows, masks, and graphic planes that erase the certainty of the image. The effect is a disturbed realism that leads the viewer to question what remains authentic in a world saturated with symbols and representations.

From the walls of international festivals like SHINE to the pages of magazines such as Hi-Fructose and Le Petit Voyeur, Reeder carries forward a practice with no format boundaries: murals, canvases, prints, installations. In Los Angeles, where he lives and works today, he has built an imagery that collaborates with brands like Santa Cruz, New Balance, and Specialized, without ever losing the strength of a personal and recognizable aesthetic.

Michael Reeder isn’t painting something we can call mere portraits; he narrates the fragile space of contemporary identity, that point of contact between the self we show and the one we try to hide. It’s there, in that tension, that his work becomes powerful.