One scroll down @quietkook, you step into a world where darkness doesn’t threaten so much as it embraces, where loneliness becomes tangible but not terrifying. Viveck Nagarajan’s art — equal parts gloom and whimsy — is the work of someone who has camped out in the storm and started to see shapes in the clouds. The Baroda-based artist works across mediums: paintings, handmade zines, bottle-cap pins, weaving macabre themes with an almost childlike sense of hope. In his words, “There’s a gloomy fort, but it’s kinda fun to camp out.” It’s this balance — doom paired with an odd sort of joy — that defines Viveck’s style: a soft, almost tender interrogation of anxiety, grief, and queerness.

Viveck’s works are a diary of someone navigating the chaotic horror of their mind — painted nightmares turned into melancholic beauty. The figures he creates are otherworldly but relatable: small ghosts searching for peace, lonely creatures adrift in universes. “People have told me my style is dark, gloomy but the cute kinda dark,” he says. There’s no gore here, no cheap tricks of horror. Instead, the haunting emerges from the very human ache of loneliness, from “the horror inside our heads”.

This sense of personal confrontation, unfiltered and raw, comes alive most viscerally in Viveck’s zines. Zines, he explains, are his unpolished, unedited outlet, a space where breakdowns and cries for help can be honest without shame. “The thing about zines I love the most is how I can write the saddest of things or the filthiest of things, and people will still read them and BUY THEM! My very first zine was literally a mental breakdown on paper, and yet people read it and said, ‘YES, SAME.’ ” Zines, for him, are lifeboats, hand-delivered to strangers who might recognize the sinking feeling as their own. It’s a practice rooted in the very essence of the medium: urgent, deeply personal, and free of censorship.

Viveck’s identity as a queer artist further threads itself into the zines’ DNA. “Zines are so punk rock,” he emphasizes, celebrating their refusal to bow to algorithms, societal norms, or quieted self-expression. For him, they are a way to document his queerness without apology: his gender identity, sexuality, and ever-evolving sense of self. 

Lately, Viveck has been enthralled by the small. Handmade stickers, tiny pins, and art so minuscule it feels, paradoxically, the loudest. “The smaller any art is, the louder it gets,” he says. “Maybe you’ll stick it on your door, and maybe someone else will see it and knock, and suddenly you’re sharing cinnamon tea and hurt stories.” His art invites connection in a time of isolation, gently coaxing us to step out of our own gloomy forts to find someone else waiting there.

Viveck Nagarajan is not afraid to put his darkness on display. Yet his work never veers into nihilism. Instead, it holds space for both the monsters and the flowers, the grief and the hope. In his own words, “Perhaps there’s more to see, perhaps there’s a new adventure about.” In his zines, in his ghostly paintings, and in the quiet corners of his imagined worlds, there’s always room for someone else to pull up a chair.

Follow Viveck (quiet kook) here.

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