Minister of Culture of the Municipality of Gibellina (Italy), Prof.
Art critic and curator of cultural projects of literature and visual art
“How many roses to conceal an abyss...”
Umberto Saba
EVA (Evgenia Vasilyeva) is an artist who, with her fascinating artistic research via diverse languages, reveals the signs of palpitating secret life concealed behind the everyday routine consisting of images that unceasingly fill our eyes and our souls.
EVA is a genuine explorer of deepest, mysterious and hidden senses that are immanent for every image of human and virtual landscape, for the image that lives before our eyes.
Nowadays, when human life is inevitably based on iconic communication and on bulimic consumption of images, EVA’s artworks are an attempt to awaken our sight, asleep and anesthetized by the invasion of the evident visual. EVA seeks to help us to perceive the symbolic meaning concealed in images created by humans.
Her photographs are a genuine journey that helps to discover the unexpected, to experience surprise. This journey acquaints us with the ingenious fiction of a human who tells us about himself, or herself, and about the reality, using visual constructions.
Photography for EVA is a way to show the game of symbolic references immanent for every thing ob-served. It reminds of Italo Calvino’s lines, “You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has rec- ognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print· in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh an- nounces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.” (1974, “In- visible Cities”)
This is the purpose of EVA’s photographs, videos and sculptures: to awaken our eyes, anesthetized and in- capable of reading everyday images. Just like in Italo Calvino’s poetics, these images contain infinite traces and signs that lead us to unexpected areas of human topography.
PHOTOGRAPHY
EVA’s manner of taking photos is striking: she takes you by your hand and guides you inside, in the world of im- ages, to make you experience new visual adventures, to make new ideas arise in you, the ideas that will de- stroy the evident representation of the sense of life.
The photography is a new vision of what is part of life and of the images that reflect it, it is a new way to see, neither a dream, nor a fruit of imagination, but the result of research for someone who seeks to find real traces that are unconsciously left by humans.
TANINO BONIFACIO