“The image of a city is as much a discourse on the city as a description of the city.”
(Jean-Marc Besse)
Through painting, there is an exchange of views between the spectator and the city, in a game of representation and transcription of reality. Attached to lines and colors, the Bulgarian artist Kaliya Kalacheva searches each painted landscape to create a story or have an idea.
Art and architecture, architecture and art … these two seek each other, challenge each other, blend together. Kaliya questions the space, the time that passes to glimpse the future, but also to dream, imagine, install and provoke! The artist challenges viewers about notions of spaces, measures, time, perceptions, uses …
Kaliya Kalacheva shows her interest in the elements of urban or industrial decoration: factory chimneys, bridges and metal constructions. These elements offer plastic motifs which allow Kaliya to structure her compositions by using lines of force. Likewise, she uses bright colors to saturate the space and no longer respect the traditional perspective.
In her colorful paintings, another space is presented. This is the kind of energy generated by complementary colors. It’s the hand that moves, creating the movement in which the colors meet the other colors. Her paintings also represent a place illuminated as in her series “Pieces”. She rivals reality. She will evoke it, transgress it or reaffirm it. This represented space solicits many of the senses of the spectators and make them face their relation with the environment.
In Kaliya’s paintings, the closed or open space becomes the place for questioning the image. As for the landscape, the representation of the interiors testifies the mastery of the artist. She puts to work her plastic language, which is based on oppositions between lines and curves, empty and full, inside and outside. Nevertheless it is the color, resplendent, which dominates these works.
In her latest series “Light”, abstract stories are caused by the formation of light and air on the wood and not on the canvas. The artist makes exciting exchanges by playing with our perceptions – the light becomes dense and the spaces are airy. She combines this with the delicate act of working with wood. Kaliya Kalacheva shows the infinite possibilities of her painting.
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
