ARTIST STATEMENT. Marina Kálcheva, photographer and visual artist in Barcelona

MY ARTIST STATEMENT


DUALITIES

The essence of things is ambivalent to me:
the world is beautiful and cruel in its every second.

Pain and sweetness, tenderness and brutality — these and other dualities find expression in my art through complex colours, as well as through light leaks contrasted with deep shadows and nearly black figures.

TEXTURAL ROUGHNESS

Creating “spoiled”, grainy, analog-like images came organically, reflecting how I feel.
Combining high-quality images with low-quality ones allows me to convey contrasts in the perception of the world. The same applies to deliberately imperfect, but sincere images from a kid’s camera, and it’s an homage to the technologies of my childhood. 

PIECES AND REFLECTIONS

Diptychs, collages, mosaics — from multiple to particular, nuances are revealed through comparisons, and subtle differences are important on the path of exploration. Through photography I search for meanings. I believe that the process of knowing oneself leads to harmony.

In others, I see myself as if in a mirror, piecing together and understanding myself. 

QUIET BEAUTY 

My work is a quiet reflection, a dive into bright melancholy; a moment to pause and feel something, to think about something. I create images that reveal fragments of stories — often unfinished, open-ended.

Meanings, forms and colours are intertwined and become part of the narrative.

EN
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