Interview with: DAMN TRUE
August 2025
DAMN TRUE is a Russian artist working at the intersection of digital and physical media. His practice spans distorted portraits assembled from personal archives and still lifes of a new era created with the use of AI, collage, and elements of visual noise. His work explores memory, digital legacy, and the poetics of everyday absurdity.
Often turning to themes of loss, beauty in decay, and archival nostalgia, DAMN TRUE investigates how new technologies shape the visual language of our time. Through art, he seeks to document his era—with all its contradictions, speed, and strange intimacy.
Welcome DAMN TRUE, first tell us about your background and why you chose to pursue this career. Do you remember the first artwork that stirred something inside you?
My path to art was nonlinear—I didn’t study at academies or art schools, but I was always searching for a language of expression that could reflect how I feel the world. Art came not as a career choice, but as a necessity—a way to speak when words fall short.
The first artwork that truly struck me was an abstract piece in a newsletter. That was the moment I felt a deep resonance with contemporary art for the first time. I began to understand the originality and emotional weight of such works and realized that a painting could be a complete statement. That realization became the starting point for my own experiments—my need to find something that no one else had.
How would you describe your artistic practice? What are the recurring elements, themes, and concepts you refer to?
My practice is a continuous exploration between still life and a kind of documentary timestamping. I use AI and digital tools not as creators, but as instruments—they are my pen. My works often center on decay, trash, forgotten objects, digital noise. These things become visual markers of our time.
Key themes include memory, disappearance, simulation, and a melancholic longing for authenticity in a world where everything becomes an interface.
In my portrait work, I explore memory by using fragments cut from my iPhone photo roll. I distort them in Photoshop and other programs until they lose clarity—then I reconstruct new images from those fragments.
What inspires you? Where do the ideas come from? How do you develop your projects?
Ideas come from observing urban environments, people, and everyday dramas. I archive a lot—I take photos, save snippets of conversations, collect old things. Sometimes, an idea appears as a single image that won’t leave me alone, and I begin to build a visual system around it. At times, a project is born from a random photo or a found object.
Clearly, you have a distinct and identifiable personal style; how did you develop it? Was there a specific person or movement that inspired you?
My style developed intuitively. I started by experimenting with photographs—breaking them, distorting them, then putting them back together. I feel close to movements that embrace imperfection, fragility, and process over polish
What do you want your art to convey to the people who see it?
I want the viewer to feel: “This is about me,” even if it’s a distorted portrait or a still life filled with cigarette butts. I aim to touch something deeply personal. It doesn’t matter if they understand how AI works or if they know much about contemporary art—what matters is that something stirs inside.
We are at the end of this short interview, would you like to add something about your artistic research? How did you find the collaboration with our gallery?
It’s important to me that art doesn’t exist in isolation. It should engage, argue, reflect.
I’m grateful to the gallery for its openness and courage—in a world where art is becoming increasingly algorithmic, you continue to value personal statements and visual experimentation. That truly means a lot.