DISTANCES - solo exhibition of Catherine Tomova

October 26th - November 18th 2016

The temptation to create a verbal equivalent of abstract painting is more often than not an impossible task, risking either to sink into swirling currents of its own ambiguity or to relate only to the intellectual whims of the writer. On the other hand, the result of such an attempt could also include a positive ingredient, since every image, no matter how representational or abstract it is, could also be an image of different realities, of which the artist’s is but one. The others are of everyone else capable of establishing an intellectual connection with it.

The words seeking explanation are nets cast into the depths of chaos, catching meanings and sensations. And the painting is a crystal ball, through which one can see everything that otherwise remains hidden in the folds of consciousness. Words are also anchors, attaching the meanings to the uneven bottom by giving them names, with which they catch the images before they can be taken away by the currents of time. The name of the current abstract exposition is Distances. It could just as well be called intervals, magnitudes, retreats, approaches, comparisons… At least by meaning, if not by sound.

But abstract painting can depict states before the image appears. The work of art, the painting, besides all that it presents or conceals, registers a color temperature. The color is an electromagnetic wave, moving closer to or away from a certain place. In the same way that sound, heat, radiation, and feelings do. That is why there could be music or a summer thunderstorm in the painting; it may provoke heat or cold, joy or tears. Besides an opportunity for communication with “art’s spirituality”, as postulated by Kandinsky, abstract painting opens a passage toward reaching the unspeakably distant via meditation. That is why it is an expression of distances: of proximity or remoteness, of movement or stillness, of time or timelessness.

In astronomy, Doppler’s effect is expressed in the so called “redshift” or a movement of color toward the red area of the spectrum, proportional to the speed at which a cosmic object is moving away from the observer. The same effect can be experienced by everyone here, on Earth, in the changing volume of an approaching or departing sound. That is why abstract painting has a lot in common not only with relativity but also with cosmogony, with the emergence of the universe, at least up to the limits of our knowledge, or with the distances within the universe, to the extent that we can perceive or imagine them. The image of such painting seals not visual representations but states of being. It is not a surface, but a substance that sucks us into the endless progression of its originality. It is a self-teacher of the potential of intelligence to try to understand, to test, to live through the dimensions of the Universe – within and beyond us, of that, which forms the consciousness of all men. And not only – of all things in the universe.

Philip Zidarov

BNR: Catherine Tomova in Stubel Gallery

BNT 2, Recipe for Culture: Catherine Tomova and Distances in Stubel Gallery