The French theorist Roland Barthes wrote: “Photography repeats mechanically what it can never repeat existentially. It is the testimony of what I have seen and has been”. This theory of Barthes refers to the capture and union of the image in order to freeze it eternally, considering that the photograph only acquires its value with the irreversible disappearance of the referent.
Hristina Milanova (Bulgaria, 1976), creates abstract images derived from her photographs taken directly from natural organic forms; then, thanks to a high intensity illumination of very short ignition, she produces in them changes of tone, size and appearance that turn her panels into an exaltation of color.
Hristina Milanova’s proposals, including the black and white photographs, project a scientific as well as a philosophical dimension. The Bulgarian artist manipulates the real image, giving it a pictorial character that sometimes seems to reflect pure photographic “chemistry” in the strictest sense. The work approaches the eye directly, without intermediaries, with the challenge of provoking unknown sensations, even hypnotic, and evoking an adventure of knowledge to which only art has the key to access.
They are images impregnated with minimalism; chromatism and shapes that create a certain synesthesia between color and movement. Undeniable tendency to expand, to disperse beyond its physical space and move through space.
The idea seems to alter the space, revealing what it possesses of artifice and provoking a certain dizziness that questions the spectator and leads him to the illusion of imagining and being able to see that which we do not perceive visibly. They are proposals that manifest apparently chaotic structures in which the public can stop to contemplate all that is intangible.
A fusion that proves as the flows between design, photography or painting, always active builds a rich field in a deliberate way but with a will of plastic experimentation and a more subtle will of presentation of reality.
Critical Art Geogina Sas, 2012