Witness The Beauty of Sound

DIETER RONTE

Art Critics

The search for truth

The works of Hristina Milanova is not a visual representation of an aesthetic theory. The artist, however, does not follow any political pretensions, nor absolute abstraction. The works are secrets anchored in the artist and her artistic will. Therefore, the dialogue with the paintings and objects is not immediate and direct, but relatively simple and lasting. The artist practically forces to establish a relationship, a kind of aesthetic “contract”, which the viewer can only experience through his own gaze, to obtain a great mental enrichment. Milanova’s thinking is manifold, which has as much to do with her biography as with her long stay in the warm climate of Mallorca.
In the text “Witness The Beauty of Sound” from the exhibition at Gerhartd Braun Gallery (Palma, 2021) Milanova reflects:
Change is inevitable, it is part of human life and its evolution. Its nature, like that of the universe, simply tends to perfect itself. Perhaps the only thing we should pay primary attention to in society today – in humanity – is to heal our “sick” intelligence.
“… Stop creating more divisions and unnecessary chaos”.
Milanova calls for change, diversity, challenges us to face the facts and our own experiences that come from the heart. “Let us open ourselves to the thought of the heart“.
Strong words from an artist at a time when humanity cannot find answers to the problems it has created for itself, with the coronavirus or climate change, let alone the implementation of human rights or even the abolition of wars.
The diversity and unity of nature and man have been lost. Art, as Milanova sees it, faces a greater challenge than usual: to find new answers from within itself. And these come not only from the visual experience, but from the artist who confronts the demands with his works.
“Only when you can look into your own heart will your vision become clear. For he who looks outward dreams and he who looks inward awakens.”
Thus H.Milanova quotes the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology Carl Gustav Jung at the end of the text.
In each of the artist’s works we experience this optical world, developed from the person, which in rich and versatile references allows the world of the painting to become a platform for action. Jung’s world is related to dreaming, vision, the heart, seeing and wanting, as in Milanova’s work: mandalas, social work with children, the richness of colouring, from the Bible to romanticism, to theories of thinking about the universe such as the space people use, the stars, cosmology, etc. The artist’s desire for art is shaped by her own biography and the complexity of her life in Eastern and Western Europe. The colours are carefully placed, blending without devouring each other, not surrounding fixed shapes that would make for a heavy narrative. They are reflected in photographic references or images such as water, dream, sky and earth. The beauty of the images is anchored beyond the proclaimed beauty of nature. The beauty of the images themselves covers a traditional interpretation. Behind the surfaces dominates an intellectual complexity of the human being as an artist today. H.Milanova does not want to go on, but to go further to show new territory. However, this complexity is carried by an impregnated and common writing, whatever it is: photography, drawing, black and white or color, technique, image or installation, object or video.
Art and life are formulated as a unity. Therefore, each new work is at the same time a biographical update. Harald Szeemann entitled these artistic procedures in his famous 1969 exhibition in Bern: “When attitudes become Form. Transmission of the diversity of possible interpretations of our world in an aesthetic dialogue”.
Only Milanova allows herself more freedom, as she first creates only for herself, and then invites the viewer to share the biography with her, in order to enrich both parties. Works can be read in many different ways, an infinity of ways, so to speak, that are always evolving in the mind.
In 1962, Umberto Eco formulated the famous words “opera aperta” – the open work of art that is completed in different ways in the minds of the spectators.
The reflected emotions thus emerge as a visual, rational level of experience. This intrusion is almost provocative, i.e. it arouses curiosity, in the senses of others and should be understood as a sensual invitation to a dialogue without narrative. And yet, the potentials for assimilation are produced through the use of videos that portray realities in a strongly marginalised way. Narration and sentiment increase their use to the point of relying on objects in order to be able to continue thinking in peace. The works show how a life uses visual information and personal experience as a form of expression.
Art is not only the visual proof of a curator’s sociocultural thesis, as the last Documenta or museum collections demonstrate. Art remains a stage for ideas and theories, art is immediate optical truth, art is truth and aspiration at the same time. Art is also diversity, the expression of an individual, the search for one’s own truth.
However, simplicity is not simplicity. In Milanova’s work it reveals itself as a complex force directed towards the future, with indirect references to possible examples in which history is also reflected (the Renaissance) and in which the freedom of art is recognized.

DIETER RONTE

Palma de Mallorca,
December, A.D. 2021

Witness to the beauty of sound, is the title of Hristina Milanova’s new exhibition and the beginning of a new stage in Hristina’s artistic career, after three years of work and research. And in her own words:
“A non-linear journey through graphic-plastic representation together with my passion for cosmology and symbology from which I extract geometry together with symmetry giving rise to the representation of mandalas”.
A process of change both for Hristina Milanova and for the Gerhardt Braun Gallery, which inaugurates a new space with this exhibition. Witness of the beauty of sound is a witness of the changes we are living. Changes, changes, changes, changes, that make us see that we are energy connected with living beings and nature, generating information that goes down in history. The history that is “alive” in connection with the artist who captures that energy and transforms it into art. It is the moment of creation. Creation with a double meaning as the origin of life and of the artistic work. In the origin beats the heart between – life and death – the beating heart origin of Hristina Milanova’s works.
Because Hristina Milanova has focused on the study of the inner representation of the human being, fleeing from the stereotypes imposed by the abuse of the external body trivialized by the media. The body has ceased to be a battlefield to become a field of celebration of life. Life connected with nature and the universe, in a beat, in a pulse, in a beating heart. The heart, which is a concept with a long cultural tradition, is in the privileged place as the generator of emotions, and today this idea is perpetuated, turning its back on scientific knowledge that places the brain as the seat of emotions. The image of the brain has not been able to surpass that of the heart, the heart arrives to our days with a great metaphorical power fruit of a long historical evolution; from the Bible to romanticism continuing to our days. Hristina Milanova’s proposal is directly related to this cultural heritage, since the heart has a privileged place in all cultures and of course in the representation of contemporary art that is understandable to all, since it addresses the less rational part and the pre-formal thinking of the human being. Hristina Milanova connects with the universe through the artistic representation of mandalas. The repetition of the rhythm of the universe and nature in a structure of concentric designs representing the reiterative and expansive fractal composition of creation. Mandalas and their visual aesthetics achieved through the use of color. The predominant colors are blue, white, black and pink combined with the repetitive structure of the heart. His dimensional observation transmits us, feelings of expansion of joy, union, love, happiness that make contemporary a primitive artistic use.

It is for this reason that the artist has chosen an organic fabric, which she treats in a personalised way with a mixture of dyes as the structural basis of her work, establishing an analogy between the organic material and the human being.
The canvas is endowed with memory, just like the blood, the heart and the cells.
The flexibility of the heart, the vulnerable, the most human, its constant rhythm that connects us with life and death makes it become a symbol of unity between cultures, represented by the installation of several works with images of children from different nations as a symbol of the purest and most fragile of our planet. Humanity, the importance of the next generations and the preservation of what is essential and important for human evolution as a species. It is the direct connection with our spirit, the spirit is simply the denomination that men give to the highest conception of the Infinite mind – living; The real essence of creation, so superior to all that we understand by mind and life. The memory is recorded and leaves its inheritance, the DNA defines who we are.
The order, fundamentally in the unity and identity that underlies its action as a cause, is what produces the successive movements in this world that constitute the becoming that is materialised in the spiritual and plastic expression of the mandalas that have a double function; spiritual and aesthetic as we see in the exhibition Witness to the beauty of Sound.

H.Milanova 05. 2021