Interview with Natalia Jezova
Dr Natalia Jezova. Self-portrait. Photograph. 2025, 115x80cm
Natalia, your Dialogue and Double Vision series intertwine classical iconography with contemporary semiotics through layered superimpositions. How do you conceptualize this synthesis as a new kind of 'visual grammar,' and in what ways does it reflect or challenge the narratives embedded in Old Masters’ iconology?
My Dialogue and Double Vision series represent the process of years of creative exploration into a coherent visual grammar, one that is both inherited from the traditions of classical art and innovated through contemporary techniques and conceptual strategies. My deteriorating vision characterized by blur and double vision became the catalyst.
By layering classical iconography with contemporary motifs and personal silhouettes, I construct visual texts that challenge fixed interpretations. This grammar is poetic; it's built on opacity and translucency, repetition and rupture, allowing me to reframe canonical imagery through a lens of subjectivity, cultural memory, and embodied perception. It is a language of both clarity and ambiguity, where every detail, however subtle, contributes to a system of signs that speaks across time. The resulting compositional syntax operates as a multi-layered, where each superimposed layer interacts with the next, generating emergent meanings about perception, memory, and identity.
Fig. 16, Dialogue series. 2025. Mixed media on canvas, 110x140 cm.
In interrogating the iconology of the Old Masters, we uncover deeply embedded gendered and cultural narratives: ideals of power, beauty, morality, and virtue that have shaped visual culture for centuries. By embedding my own presence into these compositions sometimes blurred or ghosted, sometimes assertively centred I initiate a dialogue around visibility, agency, and the narratives that have historically been silenced or omitted.
This intervention creates a third, hybrid narrative: one that acknowledges the authority of the past, but simultaneously personalizes and destabilizes it. The result is a reconfigured visual grammar: layered, symbolic, and intentionally open-ended. It offers interpretive space at every level, inviting the viewer to decode, to question, and to engage with the tensions between legacy and subjectivity, absence and embodiment.
In your practice, there’s a powerful interplay between personal vision impairment and broader metaphorical blindness - cultural, historical, or ideological. How do you navigate the line between autobiographical expression and collective commentary in your compositional strategies?
For me, that line isn’t fixed, it’s more of a threshold, a liminal space where the personal and the collective continually merge, blur, and diverge. Much of my work is shaped by deeply personal experiences, yet these are never isolated from the larger cultural and historical structures that frame them.
I think of my work as an interface between the seen and the unseen; not just in the optical sense, but also socially and historically. My own blurred vision becomes a metaphor for the kinds of blindness we all participate in: inherited biases, historical omissions, selective memory.
Poster for the film 1159 by Natalia Jezova.
In that sense, the autobiographical becomes a shared condition. The more specifically I render my own experience, the more porous it becomes less about me, more about what it means to see, remember, and reframe. In that sense, my works aren't only autobiographical; it is a kind of mirror held up to shared experience, asking how we remember, who gets to remember, and what is deliberately forgotten. The quote by Gabriel García Márquez: “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it” captures this beautifully. My works reflect that philosophy: they are layered, unstable, and open-ended, just like memory itself.
You often speak of coded meaning, colour symbolism, and compositional secrets inspired by the Renaissance masters. Could you elaborate on the methodology you employ to encode your images today? Is there a specific logic or cipher that guides your visual language?
Inspired by the Renaissance Masters, especially by Leonardo da Vinci, I adopt their use of symbolic objects, colour palettes, and spatial composition as foundational grammar. But I don’t quote them literally. Instead, I abstract and decontextualize these elements, allowing them to carry forward their historical meanings while taking on new ones in contemporary settings.
My methodology it's not a rigid system as much as a visual logic, one that has evolved through years of studying both classical painting, history of art and semiotic theory. I think of my images as constructed texts, where meaning is created not only through what is depicted, but how elements relate to one another.
Colour, for instance, plays a significant role in my work. I use it not merely for aesthetic harmony, but as a semiotic tool a means of encoding emotional and symbolic resonance.
Similarly, I incorporate floral elements and still life motifs, often with a Vanitas connotation, referencing impermanence, mortality, and the fragility of beauty. These symbolic arrangements are not fixed in their interpretation, they operate as visual clues, fragments of narrative, or anchors for memory.
Fig.5, Dialogue series.2025. Mixed media on canvas. 73x109cm.
Compositional geometry is another key layer. I often embed underlying structures like a golden ratio, triangles, mirrored axes not as rigid rules, but as ghost frameworks that guide how the eye moves through the image. They act like visual breathing patterns, establishing rhythm and tension. These structures can also echo the invisible systems that organize ideology.
The layering process itself acts as a cipher. The superimpositions often contain images of myself or staged elements that remain partially visible, sometimes barely perceptible what I call “ghosted presences.” The use of doubling and fragmentation is a nod not only to my physical vision condition but also to symbolic dualities: presence and absence, self and archetype, the real and the rendered. The juxtaposition becomes more than a visual technique; it becomes a conceptual device, a form of visual metaphor.
Ultimately, the logic that guides my visual language is layered and elliptical. It invites slow reading. I’m not interested in didactic clarity; I want viewers to feel like they’re deciphering something, not necessarily to decode it definitively, but to experience the process of looking as interpretation. In this way, my images behave like illuminated manuscripts or alchemical diagrams: open to exegesis, filled with intentional ambiguity, and always pointing toward something just beyond the surface.
Your use of digital layering results in ethereal, almost dreamlike compositions. How do you determine the threshold between clarity and ambiguity in a piece, and what role does viewer interpretation play in completing the meaning of your work?
The threshold between clarity and ambiguity is one of the most intuitive and at the same time, one of the most deliberate aspects of my process. I often describe it as tuning a visual frequency. I want the image to shimmer between legibility and mystery, to feel as though there is something just beneath the surface: visible enough to invite recognition, yet elusive enough to provoke reflection. That tension creates a kind of visual breath, an oscillation between certainty and uncertainty.
Working digitally allows me to approach the image in a “slow-motion” regime. I often begin with recognisable forms: figures, botanical fragments, classical citations and then gradually obscure, dissolve, or echo them through transparency, repetition, displacement, and blur. It’s like a process of erasure in reverse: rather than stripping meaning away, I accumulate layers until the composition becomes atmospherically dense, saturated with implication. The image tells me when it’s time to stop, when it reaches a state where it resists fixed interpretation, yet still holds enough structural clarity for someone to step into.
Fig. 1, Dialogue series. 2024. Mixed media on canvas. 110x140 cm.
This is where the viewer becomes essential. I don’t intend to present a closed narrative. The work is meant to be a dialogic space, an open proposition. The dreamlike quality is deliberate. It creates room for the viewer to project, to recall, to associate. Everyone brings their own memories, biases, unconscious frameworks, and emotional registers into the act of looking.
So, for me, ambiguity is not vagueness, it’s an invitation. It asks the viewer to linger, to decode, to dwell in the uncertainty without needing a definitive answer. That’s where I locate the image’s emotional and conceptual power: in the charged space between knowing and not-knowing.
Your superimpositions evoke the technique of palimpsest layered texts over time where memory, identity, and temporality are in constant dialogue. How do you see your art engaging with historical time, and what is its relationship to forgetting or remembering?
I often think of my work as a way of making time visible-but not linear time. It’s layered, recursive, and emotionally charged. The palimpsest is an ideal metaphor for how I construct my images: each piece contains residues of previous gestures, both visual and emotional. They’re intangible echoes: traces of memory that have lost their clarity but retained their emotional weight. In visually processing that inheritance, I hope to both preserve it and transform it, so it isn’t forgotten. In that sense, my work is very much in dialogue with historical time, though not in an effort to reconstruct or re-enact it. I’m more drawn to the afterlife of history: how images survive, morph, fade, or become reinterpreted within the collective psyche. Ultimately, I see the work as a kind of temporal choreography, a dance between presence and absence, clarity and erasure, past and present. It’s about allowing time to unfold non-linearly, emotionally, and poetically, where what’s lost can still leave its trace.
Fig. 10, Dialogue series. 2025. Mixed media on canvas. 114x145cm.
Much of your recent work appears to be a meditation on feminine archetypes, myth, and visual inheritance. How do gendered readings influence your choice of portraiture, symbolism, and floral motifs, particularly when revisiting canonical Western artworks?
My recent series Dialogue is rooted in a deep engagement with feminine representation throughout Western art history, particularly the ways women’s identities have been constructed, concealed, or mythologized within canonical portraiture. The series investigates the contrasting gender roles of men and women, alongside the contradictions, privileges, and abuses of male power that have shaped cultural narratives.
Each new work begins with careful research into historical portraits of women, often incorporating scientific discoveries that reveal hidden layers or forgotten stories. I gravitate toward images that hold intriguing subtexts or encoded meanings; works that, when examined closely, reveal symbolic transformations or revisions across time.
A key example is the Fig. 3 from the Dialogue series, which responds directly to Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Lady with an Ermine (c. 1489–90).
Fig. 3, Dialogue series. 2025. Mixed media on canvas. 114x145cm.
A few years ago, the French scientist Pascal Cotte used a new imaging technique (Layer Amplification Method) made an astounding discovery. After analysing layer by layer the Lady with an Ermine painting, Gotte has revealed that Leonardo da Vinci painted it in three differentiated stages. The three paintings reveal encoded secrets of the rapidly developing love affair between Cecilia Gallerani(the subject of Lady with an Ermine), a young woman in the Milanese court who was mistress to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan.
The painting is a masterclass in Renaissance semiotics: every detail: the pose, the gaze, the gesture, the ermine serves a symbolic function within a tightly encoded system of visual meaning. This progressive layering, both literal and symbolic, reveals how portraiture can encode shifting power dynamics and female subjectivity. Leonardo da Vinci’s traumatic childhood: his experience as an illegitimate child and being separated from his mother at the early age, clearly resonated with the story of Cecilia Gallerani. Leonardo acknowledged and symbolized in positive terms a realm of female power that the majority of men in his era could acknowledge inversely, through the repressive strategy of declaring women interior being.
In each work, colour and floral elements are carefully chosen to act as carriers of meaning, subtly encoding the emotional and symbolic layers beneath the surface. In Western art, flowers in female portraiture have been saturated with symbolism: purity, sexuality, fertility. In my works, these elements are sometimes hyper-saturated, artificial, or digitally manipulated, drawing attention to their codedness rather than their naturalism.
I approach each image not as a fixed object but as a semiotic text: a constellation of signs, each with cultural, historical, and symbolic weight. A colour, a gesture, a botanical fragment, or even a digitally blurred silhouette can function as part of this system, constantly interacting and reconfiguring meaning. My aim is to create a visual language that interrogates how gender, power, and memory continue to shape the way we see and interpret images.
Can you speak about your process of image selection both the classical references and contemporary visual elements? How do you curate what is seen and what remains ‘ghosted’ within the transparency of layers?
My process of image selection is a careful choreography. Research plays the biggest role, but intuition and subconscious excavation guide the choices. Each element I select, whether a Renaissance fragment or a contemporary silhouette, enters the work as both image and symbol. I treat every visual component as if it were a word in a poem: weighted, deliberate, and layered with associative meaning.
When I draw from classical references, I gravitate toward works with hidden or little-known stories, as well as gestures, poses, and details that carry a loaded visual history. These fragments hold cultural memory. I choose them not only for their beauty, but for their iconographic density; their ability to anchor the viewer in a shared historical language.Contemporary elements come from my own body, silhouette. They are less about citation and more about embodied presence.
As for what remains seen and what remains ghosted that is where the emotional logic of the piece emerges. I don’t follow a rigid formula: rather, I feel for balance between visual resonance and conceptual dissonance. Sometimes the most important meaning in a work is barely visible, like a trace of a face, a nearly-erased hand, a floral shadow that echoes a lost gesture. These ghosted elements are just as active as the visible ones. They suggest memory, forgetting, or multiplicity.
Transparency becomes a tool for curatorial concealment. I’m not hiding elements arbitrarily. I’m controlling visibility to mimic how attention, memory, and perception work. What we see clearly is not always what holds the most power. In my work, the tension between what is foregrounded and what is buried is intentional. It mirrors how we process time, identity, and cultural inheritance, not in clean layers, but in shifting, translucent veils.
Work in progress (Fig. 7, Dialogue series).
Fig. 7, Dialogue series. 2025. Mixed media on canvas. 110x155 cm.
Your art sits at a unique intersection of painterly tradition and digital aesthetics. How do you define ‘materiality’ in your current mixed media practice, especially when working with digital superimposition as a conceptual and tactile act?
For me, materiality isn’t limited to physical texture or surface. It’s an expanded concept, one that includes perception, temporality, and even absence. In my practice, the digital is not immaterial. It becomes a medium with its own weight, nuance, and tactile resonance; just as meaningful as oil, ink, or canvas.
Fig. 17, Dialogue series. Mixed media on canvas, 2025. 112x141cm.
My background in traditional painting deeply informs how I work digitally. I still think like a painter: in layers, tones, compositional tensions, and chromatic symbolism. But digital superimposition offers me a different kind of tactility: one that’s psychological rather than purely physical. Transparency, blur, and pixilation become tools of emotional touch. They suggest presence and erasure, control and fragility, all within the same gesture.
In this way, digital layering becomes a conceptual material; something I handle with the same intentionality as paint or pigment. It allows me to mimic the translucent glazes of Renaissance portraiture. Each superimposed layer carries its own time-stamp, its own memory. Their accumulation becomes a kind of digital sediment, where every element contributes to the overall material weight of the image.
At the same time, I often bring these digital compositions into physical form through prints or mixed media works. This translation from screen to surface is vital. Its materiality emerges in tension: the ghostliness of the digital held within the gravity of the tangible.
Ultimately, I define materiality in my practice as something multisensory and multidimensional: not just what can be touched, but what can be felt, remembered, or intuited. It includes opacity and light, history and glitch, softness and sharpness. The digital, in this framework, is not a departure from material tradition, but an extension of it; a contemporary skin layered over centuries of visual inheritance.
Having worked across film, installation, painting, and photography, how does medium specificity shape your narrative choices? Are there particular themes such as identity or cultural memory that demand one form over another?
When working with different forms such as painting, photography, film and installation, these forms have different approaches and expressions. But despite the difference in methodology, all my projects, regardless of the medium, are connected by the exploration of identity, the preservation of cultural memory, and the unearthing of histories that have been silenced.
All my projects related to painting, stage photography and installation are based on careful research work; for an example studying female portraits, the stories behind these portraits. I constantly follow the news of restoration work with paintings carried out in museums and galleries. I work with archival materials and look for interesting facts related to the paintings, symbolic meaning of objects and colours and for the subtle narratives they carry. Often, months pass before the research gathers enough weight to crystallise into a new project.
My street photography lingers in the fleeting poetry of reflections, where glass, water, and polished surfaces dissolve the boundaries of the everyday. These mirrored layers reveal both what is seen and what is hidden, transforming familiar places into shifting worlds. Within them, parallel stories emerge; fragments of memory, shadow, and light, coexisting in a single frame and inviting the viewer to look beyond the surface.
Fig 9, Making Present series. 2024. Photograph, 97x129cm.
Filmmaking, however, follows an entirely different path. My films are born in dreams - vivid, immersive visions that seem to transport me to other times and places. This happens most often with stories tied to suppressed histories, such as The Swallow and 1159. These dreams are persistent, returning night after night until they find form on screen. Once the film is complete, the dreams dissolve, leaving behind only the work itself.
For me, the choice of medium is never simply technical. It is an instinctive dialogue between the subject and the form that can best carry it. Some stories ask for the stillness of paint, some for the staged theatre of the photograph, and some refuse to be anything but moving images, unfolding like a dream you can finally hold.
Given the international reach and reception of your work, how do you consider cultural context when exhibiting your art in different locations? Do you adapt the symbolism or anticipate varied readings based on place and audience?
Cultural context is always a vital lens through which my work is received, though I approach it with curiosity and openness rather than prescriptive adaptation. My practice draws on visual languages and symbolic systems: Renaissance iconography, floral motifs, and personal contemporary imagery that carry historical resonance while inviting multiple, layered interpretations across cultures.
When my work travels, I remain aware that viewers bring their own memories, histories, and frameworks to the encounter. I do not tailor the symbolism to each location; part of my fascination lies in how meaning shifts, unfolds, and expands in new contexts.
At the same time, I engage thoughtfully with curators and institutions, considering how the work might dialogue with local histories or contemporary concerns. Subtle adjustments in installation, scale, or accompanying text can open interpretive pathways without compromising the work’s integrity.
I see my art as a living conversation, enriched by diverse readings. The symbolic layers I employ function like a palimpsest: allowing erasure, rewriting, and re-vision. In each context, the work may evoke different myths, memories, or modes of seeing, and this variability is part of its vitality. I trust in the resilience of images to resonate across boundaries, and in the unpredictable dialogue between viewer, culture, and history that keeps the work alive and ever-evolving.
