Alena Koziol
LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW was raining, but the wind was blowing very warm. In the sky was circling of seagulls, it seemed that I was in the past, because was so fabulous atmosphere. In an antique store, I found a small etching, which shows the bridge in the past, when the upper deck of the bridge was by cars. And at that moment I was wanting to paint this symbol as something static, while around it all is changing. It became the hero of my artwork, only it and nothing else.
You draw a lot from natural and urban environment and the landscapes that you paint never play the mere role of backgrounds: how would you define the relationship between environment and your work?
While I work often more specifically with the human figure, I like to depict schematic environment, flat, giving preference to the texture, the interaction of colors and shapes. Works BARCELONA. PORT OLIMPIC and GRANADA. SACROMONTE are not exception. And although they are made in different techniques, they are united by a common idea. They are worksimpression. But this is not the impression which the Impressionists sought to convey in his works. This impressionmemory. This is something that the passage of time, interacting with the emotions transformed into something abstract. Before I went on a tripI spent three days in the port of Barcelona, and I lived on a boat. And every morning I woke up in the sunny Port Olimpic, and before my eyes are brought water and masts, staring into the sky. The motive of these cross masts is really ingrained in my mind. When I came to Granada, I had only one day to walk around the city. It was a very full day, which I spent in the Sacromonte. This gypsy district, where people still live in the same caves, where once was born the art of flamenco. What I remember about Sacromonte? White stone walls, green rural fields, a long road up the mountain, and the cross on the mountain and the sound of the river at the foot of the city. All this formed as a mosaic in one painting.
The way you to capture non-sharpness with an universal kind of language quality marks out a considerable part of your production, that are in a certain sense representative of the relationship between emotion and memory. How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice? In particular, how does representation and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work?
It is important to bear in mind that emotional memories themselves are abstract. When we return to them, we do not see in front of us a frozen image. We are located in a living space filled with light, sounds, smells etc. Just as our brain processes the received information, I tried to create a certain character maps, diagrams are consisting of simplified but recognizable images which can return me a certain emotional state over and over again. And this resort to the abstract forms, it seems to me, is the best way to achieve the desired effect and to cope with the task.
While your pieces do not reflect reality, it seems that your draw from direct experience and you traslate your
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