E L I T S A B A R A M Ó
/publication in the UBA bulletin, translated from Bulgarian/
Elitsa Baramova-Baramó is one of the artists, who pursue the course of experiment, quest and advancement. She has created the “Sediment Process” concept, an idea she has been working on during the last years, and which is recognizable as style and search in the present project. The visual language created by her has its own syntax, founded on mathematical logic and linear perspective. The works of Elitsa Baramova-Baramó focus on the aesthetics of slow motion and the idea of the artistic gesture. The structure of the images and the conditions reconstructs the illusion and the notion of gravity or anti-gravity. The symbols and the images communicate and thematize with the language of fictional reflection and create individual meaning and code in the spatial domains, raising the questions of the timeliness and the events happening in our life span.
“The Passing and Remaining Landscapes” project /paintings/ develops the meaning of the view point and the selective character of memory. By the means of painting the artist creates imaginary and fantasy landscapes, natural phenomena. As she elaborates the idea of passing, or rather passing away and remaining, Elitsa Baramova-Baramó presents an insight of personal space and crossing beyond it. And this frame is like gazing out through a window into another world, in which things are happening slowly and gradually. The focal point, according to the artist, is “the aesthetics of slow motion, in which more things are happening“, because “there are landscapes which pass away and landscapes which remain“. The lack of landscape or its presence is like a hint, an implication of horizontal structures. The concept thematizes movement as relativity, as an action in time, translation and progress in space. Slow motion as an act of overcoming and
rethinking of many internal and external borders, or merely imposed conditionalities, which we all adhere to. The artist presents landscape as initiation and getting control over one’s own spatial vision, and at the same time as a probe for the extent of the entire domain of possibilities and perspectives. The perception of occurrences is very subjective and depends on the specific personality and the circumstances of his/her development. It is a personal choice, a part of life, which emerges and passes away, a place or an event we may choose to stay in, or rather keep moving ahead. The landscapes of Elitsa Baramova-Baramó are “a quantum reflection of time“; they are present in memory, remembrances and imagination. The sense of reality is used as a method for evoking a memory, for the presence of a captured moment or a happening. The geography of personality she creates in the territory of the image has been deeply rethought and epitomized. She creates a memory which is moving, a memory which appears and remains within the field of the conscious. „The passing landscapes are vaguely specified, almost on the fiction’s fringes of their reality. They bear no references to any events and personal experiences“. The remaining landscapes are coded in memory and are or were present in the subjective reality of the artist. That is why they have been objectified as artistic acts, subjectively thought through and constructed throughout the boundless width of time.
Elitsa Baramova-Baramó conceives „the normal state of things as an utopia of a new kind, which has existed in the past and will show up again in the future“.
Diana Draganova-Stir, art critic - National Gallery
THE COVETED INVISIBLE
"Passing and Remaining Landscapes" project - exhibition of Elitsa Baramó 2020
/publication in the specialized portal Liternet, translated from Bulgarian/
The Bulgarian artist Elitsa Baramó develops in new artistic dimensions the “Sediment Process”concept, created by her. Its basis is "the idea of slow motion aesthetics" in a linear perspective.
The process occurs through the precipitating energy of linear rhythms, reminding a fusion of color and music; their diachronic nature is visually transmitted by the synchronicity of slowed down whirlwinds of grayish-white layers and wavy lines and strokes.
This imparts to the landscapes a subdued dramatic quietness and serenity, animated by jaunty, nuanced colors peeking through the holes. As if we are watching the flows of time stream down from Heaven to Earth at the will of "the Great Architect - the Creator", slowly subsiding in certain spatial areas of the landscape - a kind of "chronotopes" which simultaneously entangle and disentangle veiled and hazy fragments of natural or architectural character, or anthropomorphic kind, reminiscent of human silhouettes.
One can only wonder at the coherence and the persistent will, with which Baramó has been experimenting for years with this method of hers, applying it to new creative fields, de-semantizing and re-semantizing conceptual themes and personal experiences in the objectified existence of the paintings.
She marked the sediment process idea back in 2002 in the painting "Sediment of Movement" (Sediment der Bewegung) > mixed media 100 х 130 см (catalogue of 2003 from the Gӧttingen and Braunschweig exhibitions). The slow motion in it is presented by an ellipsis circling around a white light; it appears like a "spot" on the painting without any intervention, and from that point it unfolds and folds back to it in a simultaneous oscillation. During this period, at the very beginning of the 21st century, the colors the artist used were bright. In some paintings - almost "wild", expressive.
In 2020 the colors have become more tamed and in a way "inscrutable", mysterious.Concerning the character of the sediment process in "The Architect" project, the logic is megalithic-sculptural and "objective", while in "Passing and Remaining Landscapes" it is rather subjective-associative, dictated by the willful functions of memory and the vitality of remembrances, accompanied by a desire to "stay" at, or "pass" by "a place of days gone by - a place of one’s personal anchors". In some compositions of "passing landscapes" the author’s decision to create a double horizon very successfully conveys the idea of “levitation of the landscape“ as mirage. The remaining landscapes: “Habitat” and “Sans Changement in Paris”, are megalithic, the landscape “Metamorphoses”- anthropomorphic,
while the landscape “Vertigo, Barcelona“ bears a cosmic aura, fantastic in a way.
Complex questions arise around the functions of the luminous and blurry effects, by means of which the color-oscillating, entangling-disentangling, layer-sediment "phenomena" which appear are focused and/or dimmed. They gravitate towards undefined figurativeness, accumulating phoney mimesis, or, being totally de-figurated, lose their outline and gravitation. Then, in an anti-gravitation merge with the "background", they "fly away" towards semi-invisibility. This erasure of the boundaries between the figurative and non-figurative, respectively abstract painting, between visible and invisible, leads to polysemy. The feeling of openness of interpretation appeals to the imagination of the audience, to associations of feelings, longings, moods. Here lies the inscrutable and mysterious touch in the paintings of Baramó - the enigmatic, the phantom-like. The titles of the landscapes enhance the chances of imagination and memory to evoke a certain image and to outline a ghostly form. Or de-figure the visible to the coveted invisible to the senses. A longed invisible, imagination stretched out along the axes of a fictional landscape in levitation. A dreamy invisible, speculation on a fictional landscape. To fuse forms from the formless.
It is exactly this quality which gives the works of Baramó a markedly contemporary character in view of the increasing tendency to "mixing" and "amorphousness" in the visual culture of the "digital civilization". She attains this accent "manually" and artistically. Not "mechanically"and techno-digitally. She gives new chances for survival to the principle of the author and dismisses anonymous visualizing, which eliminates the activity of the subjective principle. The art of Baramó is innovative with its dialectic approach; it may appear to be furtively subversive, but the lack of aggression and the ideas of cultural continuity of the author affiliate her. She reaches for the figurative and non-figurative simultaneously and positions herself between the two in a "third artistic dimension". She”plays” with all concepts used in contemporary painting, taking distance: abstract, monochrome, figurative and still life objects, expressive and romantic...
The mysterious, the mystic, the longing sparkle again!
Prof. PHD Krasimir Delchev, Sofia University
Gravitation and Levitation.
Of objects and landscapes
Landscape – „Mirage“!