What is painting, if not a form of magical repetition? Layers upon layers, a brushstroke’s movement that repeats and varies, a stroke that doesn’t merely depict, but reproduces a world. In her new paintings, Kaliya Kalacheva abandons all support rooted in the familiar and dives into the ontological field of repetition — not as mechanical reproduction, but as what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls 'repetition for itself,' a repetition that brings existence into being.
The exhibition „Eternal Recurrence“ is not merely a cycle of paintings — it is a cartography of being itself, seen through the lens of repetition. Here, Kalacheva does not simply reflect on contemporaneity; she stretches it, intertwines it, and condenses it to the point where it is no longer time, but a structure of sensation. Just as in previous cycles the artist explored the notion of 'mixed reality,' here she turns toward mixed time — neither linear nor cyclical, but dense, situated on the edge between the virtual and the material, between what has been lived and what is yet to come.
Kalacheva constructs her canvases as spatial metaphors for the thought that everything will happen again — endlessly, without escape, without beginning. There is no comfort in this repetition, but there is strength — for the one who can love repetition, who can say ‘Yes’ to existence as it is, even in its most banal form, is the one who transforms the world. And it is precisely this radical will to affirm being that resonates in Kalacheva’s painting — not as apotheosis, but as a quiet resilience of color, line, and movement.
Her landscapes do not depict the world, but its reappearance. The spaces Kalacheva constructs are like metaphysical envelopes of the world — membranes between the real and the imaginary, pulsating with the energy of time folding in on itself. The layers of paint create a sense of endless reverberation, of a world that reproduces itself in ever-new folds.
„Eternal Recurrence“ is an experimental exhibition that not only poses the question of whether we can endure repetition, but whether we can love it. Each canvas is like a memory we haven’t lived or a future that has already been. And in this strange folding of time, Kaliya Kalacheva brings us back to what Nietzsche calls the 'sealing of life' — not as a submission to fate, but as a choice for depth.
There is no nostalgia in this exhibition. Nor is there utopia. There is only a present that repeats endlessly — not to return to something lost, but to generate new difference. And perhaps — as Nietzsche suggests — the only thing that gives life meaning is our willingness to live it again, and again, and again.
