Vanya Andreeva

“Layers: Still Life” is a visual project that offers a different perspective on the still-life genre, reinterpreting it through painting, digital, and graphic techniques inspired by traditional kovyorcheta – textile pieces that carry cultural memory and intimate aesthetics. These textiles have long been a focus of the artist’s explorations, and in this project they continue to inspire, becoming a visual and conceptual source for the creation of multilayered graphic compositions. Layers: Still Life connects with the forum’s theme through its understanding of “discovery” – not as a technological breakthrough, but as an intimate act of recovering visual memory and placing it into a new context. The project explores the idea of the “layer” not only as a visual element, but also as a metaphor for accumulated personal and collective experience. The contemporary remake of the still-life, inspired by the kovyorcheta, recognizes otherness within the familiar – the everyday object transformed by the layers of time, media, and perception. At the core of the composition lies an acrylic painting on canvas, in which the still-life becomes a transfer of the form and spirit of the textile prototype into a painterly, conceptual form. Over this base painting, several transparent panels are superimposed, each screen-printed with a separate layer – a fragment, whether abstract, detailed, or patterned – that can also be viewed individually, outside the context of the whole. Together, these layers form a rich, stratified visual language – an emulsion of painting, printmaking, and object. The use of transparent layers adds physical depth to the image and echoes the way the digital era overlays realities – analog and virtual, personal and collective. In this way, the work becomes a material link between past and present, between the handmade and the technological. The work aims to create images that reflect the complex nature of contemporary existence – at once archive and projection, tradition and innovation. In the context of Society 5.0, where humans and technology coexist in symbiosis, it asks: can “otherness” be internal, local, feminine, handmade – and still remain relevant? Layers proposes a form of discovery not as progress, but as a return, a rearrangement, and a re-experiencing of cultural traces through new visual methods. The work is both static and dynamic – it exists as a whole, but also as a series of layers that the viewer can mentally “disassemble” and “reconsider.”