KOCHI: At 14 years of age, Advaidh Manazhy is no ordinary teenager. His art, where inherent talent with colours and shapes finds fusion with an unusual medium, draws awe and accolades and has recently found him a place in the Asian Book of Records, too. His claim to fame? Portraits made entirely of Rubik’s Cubes! When Advaidh was first introduced to the Rubik’s Cube by one of his cousins five years ago, little did he imagine the magic his mind could weave out of the coloured blocks. Intrigued by the challenge, he set out to crack it and learnt to solve it in just seconds. “I was really fascinated with it, and requested my parents to get me more cubes,” said Advaidh, who now has more than 300 Rubik’s Cubes.
Advaidh explored ways to experiment with the cubes artistically. Through YouTube, he was inspired to do mosaic portraits. Soon after, he successfully created a portrait of his parents’ wedding photograph.“Whenever we go out shopping, he just asks for one thing, more Rubik’s Cubes. At first, we didn’t pay much attention to what he was up to with all these cubes. Later one day, he came and told us about a big surprise - he had made a beautiful portrait of us, and it was just lovely,” said Bindya M, Advaidh’s mother.
Advaidh has completed ten portraits of famous personalities, including movie actors, politicians, the President of India, and the Mona Lisa. The process can take one to two hours. “First, I select the image from the internet. The image is then pixelated and different colours are identified. Finally, the portrait is completed by placing the cubes as per the colour scheme” said Advaidh, who is a Class IX student of Bhavan’s Adarsh Vidyalaya, Kakkanad, Kochi.
Advaidh recently received an award by the Universal Asian Records Forum for creating a Rubik’s Cube mosaic portrait of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and the Prime Minister of the UAE, using 300 cubes. His attempt was to set the record as the youngest Indian/Asian to do a mosiac portrait with individual Rubik’s Cubes. It took him 56.05 minutes to complete the portrait at a stretch. The teenager wants his art to leave a mark in history. Advaidh has grand plans of making the portraits of all the past Presidents of India.