Yes, there was a very specific turning point for me. I started creating art as a personal outlet, a way to release something I couldn’t express through my work as a criminal lawyer. At first, it was just a side project, something intimate and instinctive. I had no expectations. I wasn’t trying to prove anything or build a career.

But then something happened that I didn’t anticipate: people started to respond. They connected with what I was creating, not just visually, but emotionally. Messages, conversations, unexpected support. The love and curiosity people showed toward my work made me see it differently. It was no longer just a personal escape; it became a bridge, a way to reach others, to create meaning and dialogue through images.

That was the moment it shifted from passion to purpose. I realized I couldn’t ignore it anymore. When you feel that kind of connection, something inside you changes. It no longer feels like a choice, it becomes something inevitable. And I’m grateful every day that I listened to that feeling.

I see my role as a form of dialogue with the algorithm, one where I alternate between collaborating, challenging, and refining. I don’t use AI as a final solution, but as a generative partner. I bring the vision, the emotional charge, the intention, and the machine responds with something that’s sometimes aligned, sometimes surprising. That moment of friction or recognition is where the creative process truly begins.

I rarely, if ever, reshape the output completely. I don’t believe in forcing it into something else. Instead, I work with what resonates, when an image reflects something I feel or think, even if imperfectly, I intervene carefully. I might use tools like inpainting or post-processing to adjust specific elements, clarify a tension, or amplify a certain mood. But the core of the image, its energy, always comes from that first encounter between prompt and machine.

So I see myself as neither fully in control nor fully surrendering. I guide, I respond, I refine. It’s a process of co-creation, one where my voice stays clear, but open to being transformed by what emerges.

Absolutely, those distorted figures reflect a very real part of me. At one point, my life was clearly split in two: the artist and the criminal lawyer. Two identities that felt almost incompatible, yet coexisted within me for years. Even now, while my life is fully centered around art, that duality hasn’t disappeared. I still write legal briefs from time to time, not out of necessity, but to stay sharp. That tension between roles, between structured logic and emotional creation, still shapes how I see myself.

There’s also another kind of fracture that plays a big role in my work: the ambivalence between physical and digital life. As someone who operates under a pseudonym and values digital anonymity, I live behind an alter ego. That mask gives me freedom, but it also deepens the feeling of fragmentation, the sense that the “self” is never fully visible, never fully whole.

So yes, the doppelgängers, the blurred faces, the mirrored bodies, they all come from a very personal space. They’re not just aesthetic choices. They’re a way of exploring how identity splits, adapts, performs. And how, sometimes, what looks like distortion is actually a form of truth.

I’m drawn to disintegration because it feels closer to the way identity actually works, unstable, layered, constantly shifting. A face that unravels or multiplies is, to me, more honest than a face that pretends to be whole. We’re all fragmented in some way: emotionally, psychologically, even socially. We play roles, wear masks, shift between selves depending on context or platform. Especially in the digital age, the self has become elastic, multiplied, refracted, distorted.

Through visual disintegration, I try to make those fractures visible. It’s not about destroying the figure, but exposing its complexity. A drifting or broken portrait is not a failure, it’s a revelation. It reveals the tension between how we appear and how we feel, between surface and depth.

There’s also a symbolic weight to this kind of visual language. When a face unravels, it invites the viewer to look deeper, to question what’s missing, what’s being hidden, or what can’t be contained in a single frame. That ambiguity is essential to my work. I don’t want to offer a fixed identity, but rather an open one, vulnerable, unstable, in motion.

Red is the pulse of my work, it’s always been more than a color to me. From the very beginning, it was deeply tied to my identity as RedruM, a name that itself evokes intensity, duality, and a cinematic tension between beauty and violence. Red connected everything:

my passion for film, my former life as a criminal lawyer, my emotional instincts as an artist. It became the thread through which I could speak, even when I had no formal artistic training.

Over time, red evolved from a visual signature into a conceptual tool. It represents contradiction, attraction and danger, love and trauma, life and death. It’s the color of extremes, of things that can’t be ignored. In a palette often filled with soft or surreal tones, red becomes the rupture, the thing that cuts through, the emotional anchor.

It keeps appearing because it still feels true. Even as my practice evolves and I start to use it more sparingly, more consciously, red remains the echo of everything I’m trying to express: urgency, emotion, exposure. It’s not just part of the image, it’s part of me.

That balance is something I seek, but not always in a calculated way. It often starts as an instinct, a feeling that I want the image to carry. I’m deeply drawn to emotional ambivalence, to that space where something can be both unsettling and delicate, disturbing and intimate. To me, that’s where the most honest experiences live.

I think we often try to separate those emotions in daily life, to categorize things as either beautiful or dark, soft or violent. But in reality, we feel them all at once, and that’s what I try to capture. The tension you’re describing isn’t accidental, but it’s also not overly planned. It arises from how I experience the world: through contrast, through emotional friction.

Sometimes the disorientation invites tenderness. Sometimes the beauty feels haunting. I believe that when those forces coexist, the image becomes more alive, more vulnerable, more human. That’s the space I’m always trying to hold.

External perception is a key layer in my work, especially in a time where identity is constantly shaped, filtered, and performed across digital spaces. We live in a world where how we are seen often carries more weight than how we are. That distortion, that tension between the internal and the projected self, is something I return to again and again.

Much of my work reflects that duality, between who we think we are, who we pretend to be, and how we are perceived by others. I explore this through fragmented figures, blurred identities, unstable portraits. In a way, these distortions represent the gap between the self and the mirror, the place where meaning starts to fracture.

As someone who operates under a pseudonym I feel that contradiction personally. I’m both hidden and exposed. My work lives in public, but my body doesn’t. That disconnect

fascinates me, and fuels the emotional tension in my art. So yes, external perception is not just a theme; it’s part of the architecture of the images themselves.

What fuels my visual imagination is the constant tension between what we suppress and what we feel. I’m drawn to the spaces where reality starts to blur, where personal memories, cultural symbols, and subconscious fears begin to overlap. I’ve always felt that we carry multiple layers inside us: the myth we tell ourselves, the trauma we hide, the banal details of daily life, and the dreams that haunt us. My work is where all of that collides.

I take a lot from emotion, especially the ones we don’t know how to name. But I’m also influenced by cinema, literature, psychology, and the visual language of mythology. Myth fascinates me because it’s timeless, it speaks through archetypes, through distortion, through emotional repetition. It allows me to explore the present through a symbolic lens.

That said, I also find inspiration in everything around me. In the manga or books I’ve read, the anime and films I’ve absorbed, the things I come across online, the headlines from around the world, but also in the smallest details of daily life. In faded memories, fragments of childhood, a plastic object, a strange color palette. Sometimes these images return spontaneously, sometimes they’re triggered by external stimuli. It’s a new way of observing. one that’s no longer confined by the limits of proximity. Today, our field of observation is almost infinite. The real challenge is how we calibrate it, how we open our perspective to the broadest, most unexpected range of themes.

I think that’s one of my strengths: I have a wide set of passions and interests that constantly stimulate my taste, keeping it active and adaptable. They allow me to build connections between things that, on the surface, don’t belong together, but that, once united, reveal something meaningful. That’s where imagination begins: in the friction between difference, and in the clarity that can emerge from chaos.

The space between the initial idea and the final image is where most of the real work happens. I usually begin with a precise emotional or conceptual intent, something I want to express or explore, but I also leave space for the unexpected. Working with AI is like navigating a shifting terrain: you set the direction, but the path often changes. Sometimes the machine shows you something that surprises you, something that reflects your vision in a way you didn’t anticipate. That’s when I know I’m close.

I don’t believe in forcing an image into a predefined mold. Instead, I look for that moment of recognition, when I see the output and feel that it captures the emotion, the contradiction,

or the tension I had in mind. It’s intuitive. Completion doesn’t mean perfection, it means balance. When nothing feels missing, and nothing feels excessive.

Sometimes I reach that point quickly, other times it takes dozens of iterations. But the process is never mechanical. Even in a technically mediated workflow, there’s a strong human rhythm, a kind of internal click that tells me: this is it. And once that happens, I stop. Overworking can dilute the energy of the image. Knowing when to stop is part of the art itself.

I would want the viewer to walk away asking: "How many versions of myself am I hiding, and which one is actually looking back at me?"

That’s the heart of Imago Altera: the tension between who we are, who we appear to be, and who we might become. The work doesn’t offer answers,it opens mirrors. Some distorted, some silent, some too clear to ignore. What you see depends on how willing you are to confront the fracture.