My work is based on a spiritual, or rather emotional impression, shown through a portrait as the architecture of reality. As a member of a generation that was growing up in three different states on the same territory, transition is inevitably incorporated in the contexture of my motives,. Searching for a way to establish and position the roots of the collectively unconscious, I illustrate the narrative of the average everyday life immortalized on the old photographs. I accomplish functional communication through the fusion of educational and empirical, indicating the dissociation of formal intelligence on the one hand, and emotional and social intelligence on the other. This in vivo experiment allows a raw experience of a direct confrontation of the past and the future, but also of the personal with collective showing illustrated moments that are recognizable to the universal emotional experience.

My starting point is the prism of a childhood where, through the subtle and unobtrusive play of id, ego and super ego, I raise a question of belonging, origins, family and relations inside of a community, then juxtapositioning the individual and the collective, a member and the group, and the functioning of a microsystem of singulars inside of a plural. With that I am pointing on the importance of the healthy personality structure and I am searching for a sublimation as the healthiest defence mechanism used to form a harmonious functional society. By inductive and deductive thinking I notice both the patterns and the changes in the behaviour of the entity faced with the order of the array, and the inevitability of a reaction of the beholder on such an action of the composition, is my driving energy.

My work is an analytical study on emotional intelligence and it's a constant work on the raising awareness on that, the most imgportant sphere in the evolution of the personality, but the one about which so little has been researched, yet, it's in our genetic code. Following the artistic heritage of the Orthodox iconography, the art of the long tradition that recognizes and testifies emotion long before the official psychology would recognize it, I examine and confront a denotation of ecclesia in it's traditional and applied connotation (church, Greek: Ἐκκλησία - "assembly", "congregation" ). By concisely defined characters and accented individuality, I question the identity as an independent element and the boundaries of that independence within the unity in which it's situated, while the dramatic contrasts of the grey values, as a sublimation of white and black, highlights the importance of the achieving the harmony in the communication within a composition as a system on the microlevel.

Nevena Ivanović Guagliumi