Diaries / Signs of Time
Painting Project
Diaries / Signs of Time is a long-term painting project by Maryan Besaga, conceived as a visual chronicle of inner experience. Individual works emerge as responses to encounters, anticipation, intuition, personal experiences, and events in the external world. Yet the artist does not document these events literally. Reality passes through personal experience and returns to the canvas in the form of colour, gesture, texture, rhythm, and abstract sign.
In the early works of the series, the immediacy of emotional impulse predominates. An encounter between two people may become a collision of streams of colour; anticipation may transform into a space of tension and expectation; intimacy may reveal itself through a particular “chemistry” of colour. The real landscape merges with an inner landscape, while accidental forms and painterly gestures acquire the meaning of personal signs.
Over time, Diaries moves beyond the boundaries of private experience. War radically alters the emotional tone of the cycle. Ruptures, collisions, dark masses, and fragmented structures begin to appear in the works. Historical time enters personal space, yet even in the most difficult works, the series never becomes a direct documentation of tragedy. What interests the artist above all is what external reality does to the inner human being.
Alongside traumatic experience, light, colour, and an upward gaze gradually return. The sky, luminous spheres, imagined landscapes, and ambiguous signs become images of hope and the future. The boundary between what has been seen, experienced, imagined, and anticipated becomes increasingly blurred. In this way, the diary entry transforms into a space of metamorphosis.
In the later works, the personal and the historical open into a broader existential dimension. Life, struggle, light and darkness, sacrifice, purification, faith, and presence appear not as literal symbols, but as states manifested through the very matter of painting. The painting becomes a place where experience is not so much represented as enacted.
Diaries / Signs of Time does not form a linear narrative, nor does it seek to explain every event. Between the works remain pauses, unknown pages, and personal stories that do not need to be revealed. This fragmentation is part of the project’s structure: memory, too, preserves time selectively — through individual images, sensations, signs, and moments of particular intensity.
In this way, Diaries / Signs of Time becomes a visual chronicle of the inner human being within real historical time — a space where personal memory encounters history, and lived experience is transformed into a painterly sign.
