"TELL ME THE TRUTH was created in memory of my older brother, David Acevedo, an excellent artist in his own right. He tragically succumbed to cancer in 1986 at age 35.

The title originally came from the emotional tension of wanting to know the truth about the diagnosis of a terminal illness. But it can also apply to contemporary politics. How democratic societies are successfully sustained with agreements on scientific truths. However, with an acknowledgement that the facts (truth) can and should be updated as humans collectively learn more and evolve."

– Victor Acevedo 

The final version of TELL ME THE TRUTH was created by combining two digitized photographs. One photo is of David Acevedo having a glass of wine, and the other photo is of a few friends sitting around a table in Hollywood, California, in front of Victor Acevedo’s 1981 oil painting called LE GRANDE PETIT DEJEUNER: VISCERAL ANALYTIC.

Dating from Acevedo’s PC Cubicomp and paint system days, TELL ME THE TRUTH includes computer graphic artifacts like "wire-frame debris" and "brush strokes" using the software’s rectangular fill feature. The artist has even kept the accidental data slur (seen at the bottom of the picture) as part of the final composition. This happened when saving the file to a hard drive that was too full to accommodate all the new data. "I suppose you can call it an early example of glitch art," Acevedo says.

EXPANDED.ART'S PIONEER GRAILS is a series of 72-HOUR OPEN NFT EDITIONS presenting paradigmatic artworks from key figures in the history of digital art.