Ave Maria Ericeira Painting

Emotional Geography - Territories of Identity. My work explores the emotional topography of identity - the invisible landscapes shaped by memory, culture, migration, and inner transformation. Extensive travels across Southern and Central Europe, North Africa, and Mexico have deeply influenced my visual language. I am not interested in documenting places; instead, I absorb their atmosphere - their light, textures, architectural rhythm, and human presence - allowing them to resurface later as emotional imprints within my paintings. Through expressive lines, fluid pigment, and instinctive gestures, I dissolve the boundary between portrait and environment. Figures are never isolated; they emerge from fields of color and movement, as if shaped by the spaces they inhabit. I am particularly drawn to strong feminine archetypes - not as individual portraits, but as carriers of cultural memory. Faces become territories. Color becomes language. Dripping forms and layered textures reflect the fluid, unstable nature of contemporary identity - especially within a world shaped by displacement and cross-cultural exchange. Urban fragments inspired by European cities appear as psychological landscapes - intimate spaces of solitude, nostalgia, and quiet tension. African and Mexican influences surface through rhythm, ornament, and chromatic intensity, evoking ancestral memory and mythic symbolism rather than literal representation. My process balances intention and surrender. Water, pigment, and gravity act as collaborators. I allow materials to move freely, embracing unpredictability as a metaphor for lived experience. Ultimately, my paintings are not about geography in a literal sense. They are about inner territories - about who we become when memory, culture, and emotion intersect across borders. Some reference from collectors of my work: 'Mr. Solodov's work typifies the Russian artistic strengths of solid classical training combined with the creativity of Western painters. The colors, texture, complexity, and originality of his figures are what we seek from art.' Robert Rottenberg (Art collector, USA)