The Ukrainian artist reflects on memory, uncertainty, the tension between physical and digital practice, and why an image needs to hold more than its first impression.
Taras Haida calls his images “enigmatic traces of being.” The phrase is not a program for decoding them. It describes the feeling he hopes they leave behind: a recognition that arrives before explanation.
I create images in which a person can recognise something that feels long familiar on an intuitive and emotional level, even when they cannot quite put that feeling into words.
— Taras Haida
In Haida’s paintings, memory is less an archive than a living pressure. Personal experience can meet something shared: a sense of presence, an inward state, a past that returns not as a fact but as a sensation. His work is made amid what he calls a crisis of the future — a pervasive uncertainty about what lies ahead and what can still serve as ground. Against that uncertainty, the present acquires a sharper weight; the past can become almost physical.
That tension gives the work its peculiar charge. The images are often quiet, but not passive. Their fragments, displaced figures and strange encounters ask the viewer to remain with what is unresolved.
When the familiar becomes strange
Haida is interested in images that can hold personal and collective experience at once. A remembered gesture, an animal, a flower or an interior can be recognisable without settling into a fixed story. The point is not to hide a single answer inside the canvas. It is to make space for the viewer’s own associations.
I am interested in what connects us more deeply than individual stories. Beginning with my own experiences, I build scenes where the personal can intersect with the shared — with memory, presence, our inner states, and experiences that are difficult to explain rationally but can be felt.
— Taras Haida
His paintings do not make that feeling illustrative. Their visual appeal matters, but it is not meant to exhaust the work. Haida used to think of the idea as having priority over colour and technique. Now he is less interested in opposition.
I try to find a balance between them. The image should not be simply an attractive shell for an idea; it should be a full part of the statement.
— Taras Haida
The idea, in turn, needs enough force to leave something for the viewer to return to after the first impression has passed.
Painting and the digital mark
Although Haida has worked in both painting and digital collage, he currently gives most of his attention to painting. He does not want to transfer his painted subjects directly into digital form too soon, because he is wary of exhausting their potential in a second medium.
That is not a rejection of digital practice. It is a question of finding its own terms. Haida is looking for a form of digital work that is not simply a continuation of painting, but a visual language with possibilities that cannot be fully realised on canvas.
The glitch is one of the places where the two territories meet. For Haida, it is not merely a sign of technical failure.
It is above all a symbol of our digital era.
— Taras Haida
When digital artefacts enter a painting, they become visual markers of the time in which we live — interruptions that let the digital world into the material space of the canvas.
The collision matters because it refuses an easy division between the physical and the virtual. Haida sees the two environments as increasingly entangled in how we perceive the world. The painted glitch makes that entanglement visible without pretending that a canvas and a screen do the same thing.
From adaptation to mimicry
The shifting meaning of Mimicry offers another way into Haida’s evolving practice. When he first approached the subject in 2019, he saw mimicry in more romantic terms: as a means of adapting to one’s surroundings, protecting vulnerability or constructing an image of oneself.
Over time, the idea has darkened.
In a broader social context, I now see it much more negatively.
— Taras Haida
What once concerned personal defence mechanisms has become a question about what happens when mimicry becomes collective.
That change does not turn the work into a moral lesson. Instead, it sharpens Haida’s attention to the uneasy point where an individual gesture becomes a pattern, and where a form of survival can acquire a wider social cost.
Images that continue after looking
Haida’s reference to Maya Deren makes his way of thinking about images especially clear. He is drawn to the Ukrainian-born avant-garde filmmaker partly through David Lynch, one of his own major cinematic touchstones. Deren’s brief films feel, to him, like surreal cinema edited according to the logic of collage.
After watching them, there remains a strange, lasting feeling of silence. I like that state in which the images continue to live inside you even after the viewing has ended.
— Taras Haida
This is also a useful description of Haida’s ambition for painting. He is not trying to supply a complete explanation of the work. A title, an image and a fragment of context can open a space, but the encounter has to remain active. The painting should have something left to say after its initial visual force has receded.
An organic way of being seen
Haida’s approach to visibility mirrors that patience. He does not describe a rigid promotion system. Instead, he has often responded to invitations and paid attention to where the work itself might lead: who it connects with, and in what contexts it can develop further.
Instagram has brought him the greatest number of collectors so far, followed by galleries and art dealers, which introduce the work to new audiences. He is clear, however, that there is no universal promotional method that works equally well for every artist.
I avoid all kinds of trend-driven methods. What matters more is finding your own way of communicating — one that does not contradict your artistic position and values — and gradually forming an audience to whom the work is genuinely close.
— Taras Haida
For artists trying to understand their own position, Haida recommends seeking informed outside perspective early on. It can be difficult to recognise what distinguishes your work when you are too close to it. Support from people who understand the art world, he says, can help an artist see both how their practice is perceived and where it might go.
He has also reconsidered the language of an artist’s “brand.” Once the word felt too commercial and distant from art itself. Now, he understands it as a combination of positioning, recognition and quality: what a name comes to stand for, the values and visual language it carries, and the trust it builds with collectors, galleries and the professional field.
The unfinished question of digital ownership
Haida’s openness to the digital does not mean that the questions around it are settled. He collects physical music formats himself, and speaks candidly about the importance of an object’s material presence, history and the feeling of owning something specific.
For that reason, the difference between a work entering a museum collection and a digital work being sold directly to a collector remains productive rather than resolved. A museum acquisition gives a work an institutional context and a place in cultural memory. Direct digital collecting opens another set of possibilities, while leaving open questions about what it means to own a digital artwork.
He does not want to make final declarations while digital art is still developing so quickly.
I am very interested in watching this process.
— Taras Haida
The same restraint shapes his thoughts on AI: artists, he believes, will continue to begin with their own ideas, experience and inner need to say something, using AI as one technical tool among others.
What matters most in Haida’s work is not a divide between old and new media, nor an attempt to make uncertainty disappear. It is the effort to make an image capable of staying with us: an image that meets the present, makes memory tangible and leaves a trace that cannot be fully rationalised.
Explore Taras Haida’s Digital Original site to see more of his work. For artists considering how a body of work can live beyond the speed of a feed, Digital Original offers a professional website for artists and a place to explore more artist websites.
