Letter of Reference

About the art of Rumiana Yotova

Rumiana Yotova is among the few, born with a special sense for time and an even more special sense for the place in the space. When I try again to approach her pictures, as partial witnesses, they are incapable to tell what they know about her, because they were created in a world that doesn't exist beyond the human perception. There, events run quickly or slowly or even don't run, fixed in themselves and alien to the popular logic. I understand that I enter in a place where the life of art is determined by its own rhythm of light and shadow, of warmth and coldness, and of colour and gesture. The disarranged parts of red, blue, golden grey, nephrite and green create a mood that slowly passes from one to another picture, while the trace of this movement shows a complex image of a world where everything happens once for ever.

Without dwelling on a certain theme or a separate plastic problem, in each picture Rumiana creates a critical situation with introvert images in an environment with visible expressions of sensitive feelings. This substance of imagination suggests expressive conditions and mysterious messages in relief of the senses and taste for beauty. The mood in the pictures is influenced by the tension among the forms and colours. The complete cohabit of abstract and decorative elements is subordinated to the clear painting norms, consequent colour decisions, balanced composition and deprived from illustrative stories.

With elegant, touching precision Rumiana creates a pictural emotional world, which distinguishes in vitality and individualism, with specific concentration on detailed plastic problems. This world is filled with picturesque substance that is capable to revive, and is rich with beautiful visions and captivating mood.

Her art is like a promise pronounced quickly but remaining for ever. Her ideas, themes and compositional order make her always free to choose any direction and to do the next step forward.

The open dialog that Rumiana offers to us provides a link with a new reality far away from that old known charming artistic fiction and creates possibilities for discourses on contemporary tendencies in the art of painting.

The big challenge and the big enigma in her creative work are based upon the skilful cohabitation of reality and fantasy, of the well-known old and provoking new. The abstract environment in these pictures has a role of a visual character and a visual expression of spiritual energy which accepts human as a special part of itself. This environment models, swallows parts, and adds forms. In this way spirit destroys the history of each plot and eliminates the time of actuality. It suggests action and expressiveness of conditions as typical for the contemporary way of thinking.

In her development Rumiana found again a way from sensitive to expressional abstractionism and submitted her contribution to the panorama of contemporary Bulgarian and European art.