About | Biography

GLASS DRAWINGS

The findings in Darina’s new adventure represent composite creations, combining the content and impact of its three layers – continual base, the drawing engraved on glass, and the natural light, dissolved in the layer of air. This way Darina’s creations change with the viewing angle, receiving additional accent by the zone of Op Art.

With a normative approach Darina’s “glass drawings”, as any other visual arts creation, demonstrate the correlation between the two components – stylistic and narrative. The first could be defined as the aesthetics of graphic minimalism, found near the limit of non-figurativeness. As a result of the described above, the narrative is practically missing, converted into an anti-narrative. It is replaced by something more adequate, as far as the language of the contemporary art form is concerned, an associative impact key to individual deciphering.

The purely aesthetics conflict between black and white, silhouette and stroke, surface and volume, remaining somewhere in the border zone of the image and its absence, actually becomes a source of sensory suggestions. And in the specificity of this exposition they are filled with the signs of some monumental unti-utopia, or dystopia  rather, of distant past and near future, in which forms, volumes and totems exist in situations out of touch with place and time.

Movement and thickness, and frozen sound, in addition to tension and balance, all of these united by logic, exist in the created by the artist composition and aesthetics. The quality of the last are the result of something particularly interesting: the brightly colourful, not long ago elaborately detailed artist Darina Tsureva, has focused her earlier polychromatic works in a single point, powerfully concentrating it on the black, which in fact is an absence of colour, and on the white, gathering the whole spectrum in a fast spinning disk of the colour table.

Separately the black and the white are the emanation of invisibility, but with the original experience with her engraved glass works Darina has turned them into creations beaming graphic mystic of mysterious and unknown idols. The spectrum reduction to black and white converts the method into visual double code, with which the author achieves the equivalent of the polychromatic, and with the combination of the collage layers and the playfulness of the light through the engraved glass, she succeeds in discovering something really rare – 50 shades of black.

Philip Zidarov

THE GRAPHIC OPUSES OF DARINA TSUREVA

I have always deemed Darina Tsureva’s art as a triumph of colour and unconfined shape, an embodiment of positive emotions and unequivocally lively attitude. But I was truly astonished by her latest exhibition, graphics or more precisely engravings on glass, shown at the Stubel Gallery. Thought of those images as private revelation, but month after month they never faded in my mind, remained unrelenting, with seeming simplicity.

Substantial components of creating the wholeness of this collection is the considerable volume and the spatial amplitude, unusually constructed aspects and asymmetries, along with the intentionally designed fragmentation.

To say that Darina is drawing actual objects will be inaccurate, despite of their relative specificity (Scrap, The Falling Temple, Unknown Shape), textual naming (Arena, Spiral, Attraction) or visibly familiar technical depiction (spring, arch, bridge, etc…).
The spatial forms, impressive with the image of their strength and definite unexpected presence have been turned into creative elements of an imaginary self-reliant artistic reality, versus pictures of actually existing objects.

In order to decisively recreate her own sense of relative boundaries of creative space and forms, Darina Tsureva has designed their dual perception. This called upon her to “invent” her own technique involving different means of graphics representation.

The delicate engraving of images on glass, the double frame built in the glass plane, along with the “deep” pause between the engraving and the dark background, create a provision of an artistic body of new genre.

Because it not only holds a graphic image applied on a piece of paper and then framed, nor is it just a flat matte-transparent engraving on the glass, it also adds the reality of an actual physical space. This in turn makes possible the added perception of the engravings with the richness of their various aspects and spatial dimensions.

Whether this collection exhibits an all around turn, an ensuing creative stage for the author, or just a subsequent experiment, is not that important.

What is important to me, is the realisation that a new phenomenon is born before our eyes, significantly content replete, sculpturally absolved, and technically driven to a convincing image of unambiguous explicitness.

With the abundance of images, subjects, technical means, and individual scripts existing in the contemporary graphic arts, it’s monolithic presence is here to remind us of the possibility of form and content to co-exist and deplete each other.

In this case the meaningful resonance and formal decisions are two sides of the same coin, they do not, and can not have separate lives outside of their co-existence and insigh.
Violeta Vasiltcina