Miryana Todorova

Painting has always played an important role in Todorova’s artistic development. Similarly to the way she develops her performances and installations, in her paintings she not only experiments with color, lines and shapes but also gives expression to her visionary thoughts and conflicted emotions about body and architecture, inner forces of existence and outer artificially-produced constructs in society.

Her most recent works ‘Daring Times’ explore hybrids and variations of sublime territories, heightened shades and tones, bright light, glowing from sunsets and sunrises within a mix of naturally and unnaturally produced structures of growth and abundance. Todorova draws ideas from natural patterns, foliage formations and diverted growth appearances of trees, branches and leaves and the combination they create with optically distorted light sources and relics of everyday life occurrences. The explosion of layered, fluid, almost calligraphic lines on the surface of the paintings set up the stage for encountering a more idealistic environment and new utopian structural possibilities for intersections and crossovers.

On a more philosophical level, the ideas within the work focus on adaptations; not quite fitting but being considered fit, perceiving a structure and not being able to surpass it and cross over, on the other side of it. There is an ongoing attempt to reshape the body to adapt and fight with existing landscapes and structural powers of oppression and disregard. Multiple layers within the paintings convey the feeling of being both submerged and removed from the landscape. The canvas becomes the medium for performing vulnerability and strength while bound to oppose a world shaped more by differences and conflicts rather than by connectedness and collaboration.

How can we foster more direct links between nature and architecture and the bodies and forces we would like to strengthen within ourselves? Maybe we have to imagine inhabitation and occupation differently while opening up new possibilities for connecting and sharing.