NATASHADIKAYA.COM

DEEPLY ON THE SURFACE

Series  of paintings

My work is concerned with the urban environment that we live in, with its increasing complexity and impact on our social and individual life. All my life I have lived in big cities in western and eastern Europe, and this experience of living in very different forms of urbanity has become the starting point for the ideas in my most recent paintings.

City life with its glamour and magnetic pull, its multilayered networks and constant circulation, excites and energises us. Millions of colour-coded lines operate this urban system, configuring its organisational and social landscape. Above ground there are wires carrying electricity and telephone lines, and wireless networks carrying mobile phone, internet and satellite signals. Below ground there are pipes carrying more cables, and water, sewerage and gas.

This independent, invisible linear system also controls and frames the way we behave and look at the world, according to its own linear code. The more I think about it, the more I meditate on growing alienation and shallowness, and on human beings transformed and disconnected. We either accept or feel trapped in a networked semi-public, semi-private space where we are showered with, or overloaded by, information and ever more implicitly directed and manipulated by that linear system.