Understanding Kitsch as Alchemy Through Emotional Exaggeration
When I think about kitsch as alchemy, I think about the peculiar way emotional exaggeration can transform sentiment into something strangely honest. In both cinema and contemporary art, excess can become a form of truth-telling, especially when the inner world is too layered, too luminous, or too heavy to be conveyed through restraint. I have always felt aligned with the kind of maximalism that dares to show feeling in its full radiance. Baz Luhrmann’s belief that heightened visuals reveal emotional truth resonates deeply with me, because I work with a symbolic vocabulary where brightness, contrast, and ritual motifs operate like spells. Under the right hands, kitsch becomes a vessel for sincerity, not a mask for it.
When Exaggeration Stops Being Decoration and Starts Becoming Spellwork
In my creative process, exaggeration is never about adding noise. It is a way of magnifying an emotion until its internal architecture reveals itself. A glowing seed might pulse brighter than the natural world would ever allow, a mirrored bloom may open with impossible symmetry, yet these impossibilities feel more real to me than literal representation. They express the intensity that exists beneath the quiet face we show the world. This is where kitsch becomes alchemical: through its excess, it offers clarity. The visual drama acts like an intuitive lens, sharpening the emotional frequency until it becomes unmistakable.
Cinematic Maximalism as a Mirror for Emotional Truth
Luhrmann’s sensorial worlds use colour and contrast the way a ritual uses fire—bright enough to illuminate what would otherwise remain hidden. His maximalism does not overwhelm; it reveals. When I paint botanical guardians under dusk-toned halos or let petals flare with ember-glow around a central figure, I draw from the same principle. Emotional exaggeration becomes a language that allows the unseen to rise to the surface. In this sense, the atmosphere becomes the message. A velvety black or a saturated green does not decorate the scene; it articulates the emotional weight beneath it.
The Botanical Logic of Exaggeration
Nature has always been my metaphor for emotional alchemy. Flowers, in reality, are already flamboyant: they lure, warn, protect, and seduce through colour and form. By amplifying these qualities—pushing glow into the shadows, lengthening petals into dreamlike curves, deepening the grain until it feels talismanic—I tap into what nature already knows. A night-flower blooming under a silvered moon carries emotional subtext; exaggerating it helps reveal that subtext more clearly. In this way, kitsch merges with folklore, allowing visual excess to echo the spellwork embedded in Baltic and Slavic botanical myth.
Kitsch as a Portal to Emotional Honesty
There is a softness in boldness that people often overlook. Excess can be tender. It can hold grief, longing, or desire with more spaciousness than subtlety sometimes can. When I create compositions filled with threshold imagery, glowing petals, or etheric geometry, I use maximalism as a doorway. It allows me to say something emotionally complex without flattening it with minimal restraint. Kitsch as alchemy means trusting that a heightened colour or a dramatic texture can capture the soul’s weight more precisely than a neutral palette ever could. Emotional exaggeration becomes a truth-telling device.
Contemporary Art’s Dialogue with Cinematic Sensation
My process often feels like a quiet conversation with the cinematic intensity I grew up admiring. The grain that softens into haze, the petals that behave like flickering lights, the tonal tension between shadow and glow—these choices are deliberate. They draw from a lineage of visual storytellers who understood that exaggeration can be more honest than realism. When contemporary art embraces maximalist emotion, it joins a lineage that stretches from folk rituals to theatrical spectacle. Excess becomes a form of devotion, a vow to express the uncontainable.
The Emotional Integrity Behind Visual Excess
The reason kitsch as alchemy feels true to me is simple: emotions are rarely subtle. They arrive in waves, in bursts, in colours that feel louder than language. By allowing artwork to mirror that intensity—through chromatic maximalism, botanical myth, or dream-lit compositions—I honour the form in which emotion actually lives inside the body. What some might call exaggeration feels, to me, like honesty. In exaggerating colour, I reveal vulnerability. In amplifying texture, I reveal tension. In leaning into symbolic maximalism, I reveal the subtle workings of intuition.
