New Paintings by Iva Gueorguieva – and Painting

by Julia Elise Hong


May 2024
Los Angeles

published June 28, 2024, PST
Written on the occasion of seeing Gueorguieva in her Los Angeles studio as she prepares for a solo exhibition at Night Gallery. “Iva Gueorguieva: Seascapes, Snowscapes, Kukeri,” which opened on June 22, 2024, runs through August 24.

Gueorguieva’s new paintings are on first impression expressive and material, and thus in their format familiar. Forms and gestures in paint, muslin, and string attach to one another in disorder. Colors as particles – the artist calls them “powder” – and pastes come from all directions. Figures, such as humans, legged animals, and flying things, appear and disappear in sporadic suggestions by some fields and demarcations, lined, pulsed, and brushed. These elements are entangled with one another and altogether create a shared terrain. Whether the entanglement is historical or accidental is unclear. The language of the nonlinear and the other would make a good summary – perhaps an extension of abstract expressionism into postmodern reality. But there is something beyond and beneath the language they wear.

Despite knowing or getting the paintings as such, I am touched and haunted. It is when a thing which is known moves me to sensations that I start looking and linger in silence. Sight turns into insight which stays with me even after I walk away from it. There is painting which does this, which is to pull one into time where a second gets stretched to forever and language that was once available stands aside. In such painting and time, one would look and see either continuously or continually, with and without the thing in sight. Gueorguieva’s work belongs to this kind.

After a few hours of sitting and standing in dread, a sensation felt in response to her paintings that I will explain shortly, I finally asked, “What are they?” The question came regardless of the long conversation we had just exchanged. In it was the before-language moment of a child asking the world the ontological question in all its levity and gravity, a long second of our laughter and darkness. There is the kind of painting which contains such moment, forgotten and marginalized; and Gueorguieva’s work is one.

The particularity of her paintings is that they bring forth, out of all, dread of the moment. Standing before each work was a confrontation with a very strange mixture of tension, agitation, loss and being lost, birth, and resurrection. It was not only difficult but painful. I felt alone in the midst of all other lost ones and forever pulled into the weight of each element of the work, with no meaning to be discovered. Then I heard the artist say “there’s no expression.” The feelings I had were understood also when, later in the conversation, she brought up dread as “a vital energy coupled with clear direction to the stomach” and made a literary reference to hypochondria as an alliance of “foreshadowing and aftermath,” “the dreadful and the miraculous.” Gueorguieva’s paintings are the sound of dread, the time and space empty of bodies and expressions and full of silent breaths in layers over layers upon one another. How the silent breaths communicate and resonate, and make me stay, remains a mystery.

My favorite piece among the new paintings is one titled Snowscape: Grid (2024). In it, one thin, sun-colored string stands out. It is different from all other elements of the piece in that it hangs noticeably long and loose, with its two ends only briefly attached, and appears mistakenly central and recognizable. It is either tragic or brave, or both, as it takes on all the powers and risks of being a cord between dread and the world beyond. It mirrors a viewer whose fate is to live in suspension after having seen the work and most kindly keeps them company.

About the Author

Julia Elise Hong is a Korean-born, Los Angeles-based artist whose practice spans painting, sculpting, and writing. She received her MFAs from Claremont Graduate University in California and Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway. Hong has an upcoming show at de boer gallery (Los Angeles) and is the curator of Sprague Gallery at Harvey Mudd College, The Claremont Colleges.