Confetti of Self in a Wind Tunnel

I was born in Russia — among concrete and wires, where childhood smelled like asphalt after rain and old VHS tapes. A seven-year-old boy still lives in my head, drawing dinosaurs with eyes full of longing on the wallpaper with a marker. I spent hours staring at a MacBook screen, making my first crooked sketches in Illustrator, where the program’s glitches became part of the style.

I work in the digital realm, though “work” is a loud word. I’d say I live in it — like in a strange apartment with no walls, where the windows open into other people’s dreams. My artworks are worlds where plastic ponies fly over deserts made of melted clocks, where children’s toys whisper philosophical mantras, and in the background — crucified cats, covered in bubblegum. There’s playfulness in all this, yes. But also something disturbingly grown-up, uncomfortable, like the memory of your first dream in which you died.

I’m not trying to find meaning — I invent it. Each picture is as if Picasso were playing Minecraft on acid while Bach composed an 8-bit soundtrack for him.

I just draw what doesn’t fit into words. The graphic tablet is my brush, the screen — its canvas. And inspiration comes at night, when the ordinary world sleeps, and only the occasional trolleybus glides through the streets like the ghost of a forgotten thought.

And if surrealism had a child’s face, with a strange half-smile wandering across it — that might be me. (Maybe.)