City and Nature by Tatjana Maneva

In the bigger, more complex, with no way out labyrinth of our urban “ existence”, Tatjana Maneva set off courageously, self – abandoning, with faith and persistence of a Nabokov, and with an Orphean light in the eye, on a journey of which existence we do not know till the very end. Abandoning every kind of “real time “chronology, she leaves through the free landscapes that contains all times. Those are endless circles and spirals that lead to only to one spot – that is our luminous home forgotten long ago. Her painting mastery is not only a notebook of the esthetic queries, discoveries, inventions, dreaming, it is a particular and precise topography, which is set forward in a magical and dazzling way, shaped in the suburbs of the Other world. It is all her non corporeal flight, her permanent, seismographic and sincere note of all our silent heartbeats being always a vigilant protection from the permanent, persistent and terribly lonesome voyeur – the Death. Tarkowski, throughout his troublesome lifetime said that art is a kind of prayer. Through a continuous metamorphosis, Maneva set forward the fluid, tenderness, the unreachable butterflies in contrast with a thick concrete wood – counterpoint which is present in all scriptures of true faith and celestial frankness. A counterpoint that brings us to our true portrait, our true world, our captured flight – the butterflies is not only light wings that travel in the short clepsydrae of the day. They are the reflections, the light of our only and neither eternal Souls that were never expelled from the Sun’s nest, nor their true substance for which they were created was taken away, so they radiate starry crystal light. Daring to speak to the art on this lost Ithaca of ours in a Chaupinian manner of screaming is a particular sacrifice to the altar of our civilization – devastated and parched, without any prayer which calls, awake and enlighten our existence. The paintings of Maneva despite all is trying to discover the total archaeology of all the times, the humanism in which we should be lost forever, before it becomes too late. Her way is a way is remarkable because of the magnificent calligraphic oratorio of the wings, which last a wink while a star is falling.

Text by Vlado Goreski

Translated by Gjulnihal Ismail