![AI-generated distorted digital artwork by Russian contemporary artist DAMN TRUE from the P[AI]NTING ART series, exploring internet culture, screen fatigue, digital noise and emotional distortion in an exclusive Couture Troopers interview](https://i0.wp.com/couturetroopers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/portrait-of-the-era-of-rails-and-discounts-15.png?fit=1200%2C822&ssl=1)
By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)
Most images online disappear almost immediately.
You scroll, pause for half a second, then move on without remembering what you just saw. DAMN TRUE’s work does the opposite. It traps your attention long enough to make you uncomfortable.
The Russian artist builds his world out of things most people stop noticing entirely. Fast food packaging. Plastic surfaces. Distorted faces. Thumbprints. Screen residue. Fragments of everyday digital life pushed until they become strange again.
What caught my attention was that the work never feels interested in perfection. It feels emotionally scraped open instead. Raw in places, sometimes ugly on purpose, but never empty.
And unlike many artists currently working with AI, DAMN TRUE is not chasing slickness. He is more interested in interruption. The visual fatigue of internet culture. The emotional blur created by constant scrolling. The strange tension between distortion and honesty.
We reached out to the artist to find out more about the grief, digital noise and behavioural obsession sitting underneath the work.
Q&A with DAMN TRUE
You are answering this from Balakovo, Russia right now. What does life and your surroundings look like for you these days?
DT: I am currently in my hometown, Balakovo, in Russia. In the past months, my working state has shifted.
Instead of waiting for notifications, I am waiting for a new person to appear in our family. We are expecting a son.
Because of that, my work has become sharper and more direct. It made me feel that time is not endless, and while I have the chance to show the strongest sides of my work, I want to do it more boldly.
There is something striking about the timing of it all. As he prepares for fatherhood, DAMN TRUE also sounds more certain than ever about the kind of artist he wants to be.
“DAMN TRUE” feels less like an artist name and more like a personal philosophy. When did that identity first fully click for you?
DT: The identity formed quite naturally.
At the time I was just starting in art while working as a waiter, constantly listening to people and their stories. Some felt real, some felt constructed.
At some point I realised that what defines me best as an artist is truth, no matter how ugly it might be.
That line stayed with me because it also explains the work itself. There is nothing polished for the sake of being polished. Even the distortion feels emotionally honest.
There’s a rawness in your work that feels inseparable from everyday life. Do you remember when the screen stopped being just a tool and became the actual space where your work lived?
DT: During my time in Moscow, when I had to move between apartments and lost all my money, I could no longer afford traditional materials.
That was the moment something clicked. I understood that I would try to reach people through digital screens.
I started with Paint, then gradually expanded my tools. Later I began using fragments from my iPhone archive, things from my everyday life.
You can still feel that rawness in the work now. It does not feel separated from daily life at all. It feels scraped directly from it.
The UNTITLED SERIES feels incredibly intimate because it is tied so closely to your mother and family archive. Was it emotionally difficult revisiting those memories while creating the work?
DT: This series is very personal, but there is an important nuance. It was created without AI. It is based on family archives, with distortion, colour work and experiments in Photoshop.
It comes from how my mother perceived herself during her illness. She used to call herself ugly.
After she passed, my artistic intention became to make people love what they see as their ugly beautiful.
Thanks to my father, and a kiss to the sky to my mother, for giving me the talent to fuck art.
That answer stayed with me long after I read it. There is grief in the work, but there is also defiance.
Even your still lifes feel emotionally charged. Fast food packaging, receipts, flowers, plastic objects. What is it about these everyday items that keeps pulling you back creatively?
DT: In my work, I try to archive the reality of different groups of people across continents, united by the same symbols of contemporary life.
What makes the work interesting is that these objects never feel random. They feel behavioural. Like evidence of how people live now.
You coined the term “P[AI]NTING ART,” but your work never feels interested in polished perfection. When collaborating with AI, are you intentionally searching for mistakes and unpredictability instead?
DT: For me, AI is definitely a collaborator. I see myself as an artist with extra hands. Where I make a gesture, I expect an intentional mistake from AI. This interaction between human and machine is where something new appears.
That idea of wanting the mistake instead of perfection probably explains why the work still feels human despite the digital manipulation.
After losing your mother, did your understanding of beauty begin to change completely?
DT: Personal loss has probably taken away the classical idea of beauty for me. But it also shaped me as an artist. Maybe more raw, maybe more difficult, but more honest.
And honestly, that comes through immediately. The work never feels interested in pleasing the viewer first.
SWAIPER feels so immediate because almost everyone recognises that endless scrolling behaviour instinctively now. At what point did you realise the gesture itself had become more important than the content people are consuming?
DT: I like that SWAIPER appeared during the process itself.
At some point I realised that we consume so much content that the thumbprint becomes the real symbol of our time.
Not the content, not even the person, but the trace of the gesture.
That observation hit harder than I expected because it is true. Most people barely remember what they scrolled past five minutes ago, but the movement itself never stops.
A lot of artists are experimenting with AI right now, but not everyone is actually saying something with it. For you personally, what separates meaningful work from empty experimentation?
DT: Many stop at creating something visually pleasing. A face, an animal, something familiar.
For me, AI is a way to build things that would be too complex, expensive or even impossible in reality.
As long as I can go beyond what a single prompt can generate, I will keep pushing it.
Your work intentionally disrupts the polished perfection people are used to online. Do you think audiences genuinely want to confront those reflections of themselves, or do they instinctively resist them?
DT: I think my work disrupts the beautiful Instagram image.
And I do it intentionally.
As an artistic act.
With pleasure.
Featured Image: ‘нpнpнтттт.jpg’ from ‘P[ai]nting art’ series, 2025 | Artwork by DAMN TRUE
