KELLY WRITERS HOUSE

Sibylla Benetova:
BREAKING SPACE

ARTIST STATEMENT

 
Coming from Eastern Europe, a region of rich culture with numerous and diverse influences, I try to preserve some of the specificity of the art there while absorbing the rhythms and motions of here. Icon painting, one of Bulgaria's unique arts, has a long-standing tradition. This technique, which requires the strict adherence to religious canons, is a very labor-intensive, consuming job. From the distance that separates me now from my homeland, I can see the influence that the esthetic surroundings in which I grew up has had on my paintings. Based on icon-painting technology, I use gold and silver leaf foil in my work. However, I lay the foil in places opposite to those it occupies in icons. Instead of emphasizing the center of importance in a given object, I prefer to "gild" places or objects that don't otherwise seem to us to be precious or long-lasting but which, for me, are valuable.

The technique of ripped pieces of paper also teaches you great precision of line. Once I find the balance of a painting in my preliminary drawings, I transfer it to the canvas, and I start building the form with colored pieces of paper. This process is irreversible because the glue doesn't allow repositioning or detaching the pieces. For that reason, the numerous sketches, as well as the preliminary shuffling around of the papers is a long and chaotic game—the essential creative part of the process. What follows is days of meticulous and often tedious gluing of different shreds of color to their appropriate places based on the rhythm in my mind.

Touching the paper is a sensation through which my hands have to go, so that I realize in which direction the pictures will move. The art of painting is closely tied to the material with which the artist builds the colors. Tearing the paper in pieces in a way deconstructs the light. Depending on how much space I leave between the bits, they let through a different quantity of light through the crevices of the canvas. Mosaics give you the possibility to place the object in a variety of rhythms. This is determined both by the distances between the pieces of paper and by the paper-free sections of the canvas. The last stage in the process is finding the detail that completes the picture. Sometimes that takes months of contemplating the "almost finished" painting before I finally decided what's missing. Psychologically, things here are much different from oil painting where a piece can be completed within a few fast strokes of a momentary state of mind. Quite often I start work inspired by some music, and I return to that mood by playing the particular album again. Actually, this was also the inception of my technique—I attempted to paint the music I like; to rework the art I love most into my language; to order the melody and silences through color and light.

I would like the viewers to fragment their gaze through the pieces of paper and construct their own image of what they want to see and feel. My part is to delicately suggest directions to different parts of the picture through particular details in the work. Sometimes I feel that my art is a bit too romantic for the time we live in, however, this is part of who I am.

—Sibylla Benatova