Figures.

 

"I was around twenty when I stopped drawing people. I realized that the countless paintings and photographs of people we create are just fragments of our inflated ego. We live in a vast world, yet we only look at ourselves, at images that portray us better than we are.

 

One day, I thought I wanted to create an image of a person that would correspond to our inner essence and show viewers all the falseness of the images they're accustomed to seeing. I pondered and experimented for a long time, and finally, an idea struck me.

 

I crafted an image of a person that was simultaneously simple and complex. It resembled a human but at the same time was something else. It was a figure assembled from cubes, reminiscent of a character from the game Minecraft, where players create their worlds from blocks.

 

The image turned out to be truly powerful, and I began depicting it in my paintings. I wanted people, upon looking at it, to reflect on themselves. To see that they are much simpler, and simultaneously much more complex, than they are accustomed to thinking about themselves."—Ilya Yod.