"Primitives" Gran Canary №3

Svetlana Smirnova (Russia, born in 1988) is a Russian artist working with photography as a medium. She studied graphic art at Saint-Petersburg State University of Industrial Technologies and Design and at Higher School of Printing and Media Technologies. Thereafter Svetlana started to work as a graphic designer and a commercial photographer. But soon she started to do her personal creative photography projects.

Svetlana’s visual language is influenced by Russian avant-garde, the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Malevich, and their works on the theory of color and composition. Combining this with an interest in minimalism art, Svetlana photographs urban landscapes, transforming three-dimensional city spaces into two-dimensional abstract compositions. A dialogue between the harmony of color and shape is happening through the game with flattened space. The documentary nature of the photograph is moved to the background and gives a way to the author’s visual language.

In her works, Svetlana ponders how reducing the amount of detail can increase the impact on the viewer, and how this redirects viewer’s internal dialogue from analyzing objects in the territory of personal emotional perception and gives the viewer wider opportunities for photo interpretation.

Photos are made without collage by means of optical lens effects. Svetlana is inspired by small coastal towns she witnessed all over the world during her trips, places where you can meet beauty in the simplicity of unremarkable urban landscapes.