ALMOST LANDSCAPE: TIME IN ACTION (1)
Elitsa Baramova – Baramó
painting exhibition
March 2026, Sofia, [a] cube contemporary gallery
 

The exhibition includes painting compositions, mixed media – acrylic and pastel on paper, created over the past year. They are part of the long-standing author's project "Sediment Process", the current exhibition being the 6th phase (and 21st solo exhibition).
 

The author about the exhibition:
The project explores the transformation of the fleeting moment into infinity, elevating the transient episodes of sunrise and sunset into an eternal experience of the flow of light. It immerses the viewer directly into the movement of nature, where the boundary between observer/object and space dissolves.
 

Let's build a theoretical setting in the dark.
We turn on the lights on the stage.
Allez hop! Off we go!
We run after the sun (2) so that it doesn't set while the earth is spinning. We chase the light and the Absolute.
 

Dawn promised me a beautiful sunset if the earth continues to move.
I accept the role of a traveler.
 

The sun never sets. A wonderfully warm and bright perpetuum mobile, a continuum of light. Process.
 

In this setting, the speed is a tool with which the observer manifests the will to stop time by moving in sync with the light.
 

Dawn is a promise, a trace of movement. Between the rotation of the earth and the desire to catch up with the day, a landscape flashes by.
 

Sunrise and sunset are situational perceptions of a dynamic observer in motion. What is perceived as "beginning or end" (sunrise or sunset) is a beautiful illusion of our movement, carried by the great carousel. Sunrise and sunset affirm the subjective beginning, which is subject to the immanent, the empirical. The viewer could be not just an observer of sunrises and sunsets, but a "companion" who moves at the speed of light to stay WITH the day. Catching up with the sun is an attempt to transform the Kantian phenomenon (sunset) into an eternal noumenon (light) (3). Sunrise and sunset are phenomena, things as they appear to us through our senses, while the Sun/Absolute is a noumenon—the thing in itself, which is beyond our time and space; light as an ontological category.
 

     I run after the sun, entering a thick fog. Alone with the present. The fragments of the landscape that I imagine I see sometimes touch me. They are part of a real happening. The present is an endless moment, where matter and spirit meet. The present, in which if I don't go around the wall, there will be a collision. A ray of sunlight pierces the fog, refracting into a symphony of droplets, an echo of reflections. Diffuse light, it does not hide the truth, but dissolves the ego and the subjective beyond rational, where individual meaning is lost, leaving only "white light". Forced arrival in the future drains thick existential pain. The protagonist realizes that he is "fiction" in the grand scheme of things. Miguel de Unamuno's fog (5) sends out reflections. Sublimation follows.
 

Fog is part of my aesthetic arsenal; it leaves only the closest in visible existence, the background disappears. The blurred visibility stimulates the imagination to seek further contours. I imagine that it was precisely the fog that inspired Leonardo's Sfumato. If for da Vinci Sfumato was a method for adding depth, movement towards the horizon and the vanishing point, in this exhibition fog is a refuge of the present – the encounter between body and spirit described by Merleau-Ponty (4). The landscape is not in front of us, we are inside it.
The collision with the wall is the moment when "matter reminds us of itself" within the spiritual path.
 

     The connection between this "rush" and the thick fog is dialectical and finds its visual nuance in the concept I have developed, "Sediment Process" (6). This artistic gesture focuses on the "Aesthetics of Slow Movement" as an ethical and artistic framework.

     Let us perceive the sun, in itself, as an example of absolute magnitude - a territory of philosophy. The absolute is beyond time and our dimensions, beyond comparative thinking, beyond polar perception and the duality of things.

     The luminary that creates our unit of measurement for time remains outside of it.

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Author references and concepts:

• (1) Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) "Duration and the Present"

ref. The title 'Time in Action' rejects the static landscape in order to capture the pure duration of the light continuum. Time is not a sum of seconds, but a continuous flow, the becoming itself.

• (2) Paul Virilio (1932 – 2018) "The Aesthetics of Speed"

ref. Introduces the concept of "dromology" for the logic of speed, exploring how it changes our perception.

• (3) Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) "The Empirical and the Transcendental"

ref. On the attempt to turn the phenomenon into an eternal noumenon.

• (4) Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) "Phenomenology of Perception"

ref. On the experience of the body as a point of collision with the spirit.

• (5) Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) "The Fog"

ref. Fog as a state in which individual meaning is lost in dissonant existential uncertainty.

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• (6) Sediment process (author's concept): Visual language based on linear perspective and mathematical logic (developed from 2016 to present). It recreates movement in space or the idea of constant movement in an object, even when it is at rest. To this end, it uses multiple cross-sections of the form. The plasticity of the image is the result of the movement of simple or composite forms. Using the means of painting, it creates a sense of kinetics, transforming time into a material trace on the picture plane.

• (7) Aesthetics of slow movement (author's formulation): the opportunity to observe the phase of deviation, promoting a space for understanding and tolerance that extends beyond the ego.