Velislava Gecheva

Velislava Gecheva’s exhibition “Silent Adjustments” presents a series of paintings that seem to preserve the moment of recording a memory, without trying to preserve the memory itself. The moments and spaces that the artist documents are her way of contemplating on canvas, of looking into the very process of looking, remembering or experiencing. The paintings act simultaneously as a consciously explored personal memory and as a scene seen by chance, from afar. Paradoxically, it is precisely the concreteness of the moment of a personal experience that allows the emotion and charge of that moment to be conveyed as something universal.

Velislava’s subjects, at first glance everyday and documentary, invite the viewer to look into their own way of perceiving and searching in the painting. Although expressive, boldly placed on the canvas in large, the colors that the artist uses actually carry with them the atmosphere of a very specific time and place, a scene noticed only for a moment, without being able to be retained. The figures and places are depicted without detail, but with great attention to the matter, the light, the movement or the lack of movement. Ag Exhibition Extra Text The play between the generalized and the ultra-specific involves the viewer in a memory that is not personally his – the personal moment remains as elusive, but strangely familiar and even possessive because of the way it is reconstructed. Between the different canvases, the viewer’s position shifts from very close, staring at the matter, to residing in the same space as the figures, to slightly distanced, as if seeing what is happening in a photograph or through a window. This movement, combined with the balance between detail and generality in the paintings, once again lures the audience into the very experience of the viewing process, the search for its own place and center, without the eye being able to get used to a unified way of perception. In this way, the viewer, although accepted into the world of the paintings and the characters who inhabit them, always remains slightly distanced; an inhabiting memory that is not his, capable of rediscovering or reinterpreting it, free from categoricality. Perhaps it is precisely this combination of proximity and distance that brings the characteristic calm of these subjects. Even in the contemplation of raging waters, the elemental nature is mastered by the feeling that the artist exists beyond it in order to be able to depict it.