Damien Cifelli is a multidisciplinary artist from Scotland, now based in London. His paintings stand out for the tension between something we recognize as familiar and its concreteness, which appears to us as alien. Cifelli explains the reason for this issue:

My works exist entirely within their fictional environment – the world of “Tarogramma“. I use fictional anthropology, through storytelling, to build a place with its own culture, iconography, behaviors, and traditions. The paintings are a visual representation of this alternative society – documentation of a new world.

Inspired by personal histories, ancestral stories, and recent collective experiences, I have created a place without ethnic, cultural, or gender dominance. It suggests the idea of a society where people’s eccentricity and distinct character take precedence over other superficial attributes. Tarogramma is a world distilled down into the simplest necessities – human connection and a sense of community. Values that have become infinitely more important in recent times.

Taking as a baseline the scale and compositions of historical painting and sculpture, he has constructed a detailed culture with its unique aesthetics, way of life, and way of understanding the world. A culture that is at once alien yet eerily similar to our own.