The structural world of Marina Marinova

There are artists who follow a standard logic of development. With time they master their artistic skills and gradually gain creative seasoning; other artists spend their entire lives failing to put down school tasks, and there are still others, like Marina Marinova, who seem to arrive in art geared up and accomplished in terms of both style and an overall sharp awareness of an artist’s mission.

Already with her very early displays after finishing the Academy, Marina Marinova manifested a sophisticated painting culture, a refined taste and sense of the pictorial quality regardless of smaller or larger formats, a comprehension of space in painting as a psychological environment — a few achievements, enough to guarantee secure growth coupled with distinct originality.
In just few years Marina Marinova attained a synthetic style in which sophisticated, psychologically saturated painting was only a sign from the artist’s yesterday. A stranger to both painting inertia and the aggressive universality of conceptual forms, Marina Marinova has brought her art up to a tested plastic formula born from the unexpected grasp of the contemporary city’s facelessness; following the inexplicable nature of her inner voice with a sore artistic self-exactingness; and ready to sacrifice achievements – which would perfectly do for any decent artist – for the sake of truth. This is not the general truth but the one we come across every day marked with the bleakness of apartment block compounds – the seemingly banal truth, however seen and attained in its inward notional and structurally plastic voice. Emotionally turned to itself, her art still comes across with present-day messages touching modern man captured in his ordinary monotony and banal dullness.
Against the background of excessively mobile art criteria in the vogue today, Marina Marinova is as consistent in the pursuit of a synthetic plastic line, as she is surprising with the dissolution of the structural into semantic inside out through symbols that represent plastic signs.
Had the notion ‘conceptual’ not been so very much worn-out and made pointless by artistic outrage,Marina Marinova’s art could have been identified as conceptual. Had the notion of installation not been so widely profaned, any display of the artist could have been termed installations, of course necessarily placed above the routine devaluation of this term. Every single aspect of Marina Marinova’s work – from the austere and meaningful composition, the semantic expression of the plastic structure and the architectural organization of the entity, all the way to the overall deduction of the idea, is an expression of the internal emotional makeup in which destruction and creation have been touched by a flurry whose sore and hope are the big city and solitude.
The art of Marina Marinova is not for decoration — it sits above the formula of likes or dislikes —offering no room for such a hierarchy. It represents deep reflection about the meaning and meaninglessness, the outward appearance and inward essence, the architectural and plastic principles, the destruction of the whole to deduct the part from the sign of the whole. It is an open door to what is inside and outside us - to the elusive and inexplicable carried over time as experience in the spiritual world. It is art with its own artistic and human trajectory in times of chaos and deadlock.

Svetlin Roussev