Stanislava Stoyanova’s paintings have a boldness and otherworldliness entirely their own. Her electrifying abstractions are characterized by unrestrained gestures made with bright, saturated colors and black interventions like scorched earth. She explores such elusive themes as emotion, storytelling, imagination, and spirituality in her alluring dreamlike images. Stanislava’s passion for color, ornament, design, harmony, and feminine beauty permeates her art. Her canvases are sites of ongoing tactile exchange between abstract fields of color, intuitive streaks, drips, and scribbles, lyrical lines, thick brushstrokes, and layers of paint. The artist’s vibrant expressionism is life-affirming, and imbues the work with strength, perseverance, and renewal.
Stoyanova’s acrylic and mixed media abstractions synthesize painting and drawing in their pursuit of spontaneity, looseness of form, and the irrational. The artist’s expressive style is free of any limits and has unbound richness. Her confident, yet frantic applications of pigment seem to consume her dense surface activity as quickly as she builds it. Stanislava feels the work from inside, and she releases her feelings through gestural immediacy and rhapsodic color–red, pink, magenta, lavender, deep purple, turquoise, peach, spring green and ocean blue. Her visceral physical process becomes emblematic of an emotional process and her work celebrates painting as a commanding and irresistible media. The titles of her paintings evoke feelings, sensations, memories, and landscapes with rock, hill, mountain and tree forms.
Stoyanova’s figurative images suggest mythical or religious themes and they have a contained inner peace and power. These paintings explore the dualities of mystery and light, the human figure and nature, spirit and flesh, objects and symbols. The artist taps sources deep within her perceptive understanding to inform these distinctive and evocative images. Just as she looks within herself and within the painting to pose questions, when the viewer interacts with the work, psychologically and emotionally, the concept and intention of Stoyanova’s art comes alive.
Cheril Hartup
Associate Curator Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, USA
TOUCHING COLOURS
Exhibition at the Bulgarian Cultural Institute, London
November 1 – December 4, 2017
Exquisite colouring, freedom and expressiveness of rendition, chromatic harmony—these are the prime movers in the painting of Stanislava Stoyanova. The exhibition, ‘Touch in Colour’, transports us to a new world in which the beauty and fine sensitivity of the artist are partnered with the power and breadth of the brush. Created with much emotion and creative intensity, her paintings are characterised by a strong artist’s vision, power of suggestion, spontaneity and balance in building the composition. ‘Touch in Colour’ unites a series of abstract canvases saturated with an abundance of movement, light and dynamism.
Pictorially developed through graded applications of paint, tones, and the superimposing of forms and details, they are entirely subordinate to the idea of the multilayer transition through the complex spectrum of emotions and experiences. At the same time, the main focus in Stanislava Stoyanova’s paintings is on colour. Dominating and imposing in places, tense and calming, suffused with much passion, it contributes to the overall impact of the artwork. The artist’s canvases provoke with both the structure of the colour and the essence of the image. Her works are an expression of emotion and amplitude, of non-verbal, unspoken thoughts and moods, and, as she herself says, ‘I trust myself to the moment and the feeling to lead me.’ Art is beauty, individuality, style and energy. Delicate and exquisite, the art of Stanislava Stoyanova is an inwardly experienced spiritual reality, a true ‘touch in colour’.
Diana Draganova – Stier
Curator
National Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
Stanislava Stoyanova responds spontaneously to her artistic emotional urges, and the impulses of her creative imagination, being further stimulated by her intimate contact with the sea, are transformed into paintings with distinct individual style that is not totally subsumed by real nature.
Stoyanova’s unique sensory impressions undergo a complex process of modification in her search for a particular composition, colour, tone and nuance. The distinctly rich expressive style is at the same time mellowed by her lyrical artistic grasp of the world, and that lends her works accessible poetic sensitivity. In this way, beyond the spontaneous brushstrokes and the texture of applied material substances in any of her paintings, one can experience the harmonious artistic finesse of related dreamlike nature.
Prof. Chavdar Popov Ph.D.