2024
Exhibition of painting and digital graphics in the Etude gallery, Sofia
Artist Lilyana Dvoryanova, who won the “Golden Lion 2023” award for Best Complete Publishing Project with her visual book Islands (co-authored with Emilia Dvoryanova, published by “East-West”), is presenting her new exhibition Simultaneity. The exhibition features painted works on boards and canvases, as well as digital graphics printed on etching cardboard.
A large portion of the paintings are structured as rows in a frieze composition, with each row populated by different images, beings, and narratives. Some of these are entirely separate from one another, existing in parallel timelines without interaction, while others penetrate the upper rows, as if traveling through time, thereby connecting everything into a unified whole.
However, these paintings do not simply depict “parallel worlds” that exist simultaneously. The “parallelness” of human existence is a clear reality in today’s world— it is, in fact, the very History of histories. Lilyana Dvoryanova’s paintings attempt to peer beyond this natural state of the human world. The “simultaneity” within them is not a “comic book parallelism.”
The paintings seemingly employ a linear model, where events and images are arranged one above or next to the other. People and creatures travel, communicate, and live in a kind of fairytale-like multi-story realm without “stairs” connecting them. However, the simultaneity in these worlds is viewed metaphysically from the point where times and stories merge and cease to be simultaneous but instead become timeless. The perspective of meaning lies somewhere outside the paintings, or from the highest layer of them.
For this reason, the frieze compositions, intentionally painted on boards, evoke a connection to hagiographic icons and medieval miniatures. These, too, seemingly tell stories, unfolding horizontally and read sequentially, yet their meaning is drawn upwards into the vertical plane of divine, timeless vision, where everything is in a state of “always-to-be” and Is.
