Art Project

National autumn exhibitions/ Plovdiv 2013

The graphic sheets of Darina Peeva are a good example of how behind even the most peculiar and seemingly arbitrary game of  the fantastic and the illusionary, stands an orderly system, precisely traced interrelations, a balance, which is preset at every moment and at every point, an outline of associative chains and their interruption. In this particular case this means composing graphically developed photographic images; a combination of different surfaces and “matters”, precise rhythmization of geometrical elements, using a central compositional accent. The title is also situated in this perspective: the series Foreign Intervention, includes in its mathematically calculated world empty circles, in which the fine game of the geometrical forms is “penetrated” in its specifics. As a result, the “circles” become a center of different projections: projections of matters, projections of interruptions, projections of “differences”. Thus the circular incisions create spaces between the spaces. The aggression of the “foreign” against the “personal”, as stated in the title, becomes a complex game of transitions.

It is not a coincidence that one of the traces in the meaning of the “empty space” leads to the phenomenological process of the choice as an esthetic act: the empty space is the ever unknown component of the artifact, which each individual perception fills in based on the experience, its situation, its individual choice. The circle, however, is a simple hermeneutic figure expressing the dynamic transition between the individual specifics and the abstract unattainable completeness- a figure of the wholeness.

The effect of the all-possible interlacing designs in the graphics of Darina Peeva is also achieved through this “geometrical” dynamics: in the amplitudes between the “folded” and the “flat” sections, in the relief development of household specifics(cutlery, a chair covered with drapery or a piece of clothing, a bed) amidst the abstract spaces and shadows.

Assoc Prof Dr Galina Lardeva / Art Historian

Artistic Director of the National Autumn Exhibitions 2013