BULGARIAN PAVILION

Curator: Mr. Chavdar Ivanov Popov

Assistant curator: Ms. Iskra Trajanova    

Artists: Magda Abazova, Svetozara Alexandrova, Gredi Assa, Svilen Blazhev, Bozidar Boyadziev, Milko Bozhkov, Dimitri Cholakov, Andrey Daniel , Krassimir Dobrev Petar Dochev, Aneta Dragusanu, Ljuben Genov, Nuscha Goyeva, Yordan Kaztzamounski, Ioan Kirilov, Dimitar Kirov, Nadezhda KoutevaIlian Lalev, Daniela Oleg Lyahova, Marina Marinova, Ivaylo Mirchev, Vesselin Nachev, Stanislav Pamoukchiev, Elena Panayotova, Atanas Parushev, Yordan Parushev, Svetlin Roussev, Rumen Skorchev, Hristo Stefanov, Dinko Stoev, Samuil Stoyanov, Simeon Stiolov, Vesko Velev, Dimitar Yaranov, Iva Yaranova, Ventzislav Zankov and Rumen Zhekov

CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN PAINTING – BETWEEN THE PLASTIC AND THE CONCEPTUAL APPROACH

How can one describe contemporary Bulgarian painting? Are we in a position to identify certain general characteristics, overarching tendencies or group platforms? Or should we admit that the present is a time of individual mythologies and an infinite diversity of personal idioms? How is the good old picture of yore responding to the radically changed and utterly saturated visual environment? How are Bulgarian visual artists affected by the new local realities and the concurrent processes of globalization?

Questions like these could, of course, be multiplied indefinitely. We hope that the present exhibition, without claiming to provide exhaustive answers, would at least touch upon some of the issues. The works were selected with the intention of presenting a sui generis panoramic view of contemporary Bulgarian painting, chronologically situated, with some minor exceptions, within the short span from the beginning of the new century to the present. Artists be l onging to several generations were included, ranging from the acknow l edged ‘veterans' that made their debut in the 1960s to the youngest ones who have only recently emerged on the art scene. These are naturally painters with quite diverse thematic and formal predilections. The idea was to show a selection that would be close to what sociologists call a ‘representative sample'. With that end in view, the curators have tried to bypass their own, personal preferences and to present as objectively as possible the broad spectrum of plastic solutions in contemporary Bulgarian painting without unduly focusing attention on any one of them in particular. It is extremely hard today, not to say impossible, to give an exhaustive, all -embracing picture of contemporary painting in Bulgaria . The ramifications and intertwining of post-totalitarian and postmodern trends in visual culture are reflected in the work of artists in many different ways. The teleological conception of the world underl ying the communist project, which had channeled the development of art for many years into strictly set parameters, has given way to more sober, infinitely more varied, but also more ambiguous pictorial interpretations of the facts, phenomena and processes in the life of society and the psyche of the individual . To put it in the broadest terms, these interpretations tend to evoke a post-Utopian world without illusions but also without ideals. Bulgarian painting in the not so remote past was developing within the framework of well -known ideological imperatives, in conditions of relative financial security provided by party and state patronage. It is only fair to ask, however, whether artistic experiments and quests, free from ideological or market pressures, are at all possib l e if they are not backed by independent financial resources? It seems to me that, despite the considerable difficulties encountered by the artists themselves, the answer to this question should be in the affirmative.

Apart from individual distinctions, it should be said that the works exhibited gravitate towards two basic orientations with all the variations and modifications ensuing from them. These could tentatively be described as the dominance of the ‘plastic' and the ‘conceptual ' principle, without setting them against each other in an axio logical or, indeed, any other sense. On the one hand, it should be pointed out that notwithstanding the wide diversity of their stylistic predilections, the great majority of Bulgarian artists have persistent lyfocused on the sensory principle, on the plastic and tonal treatment of the painter lytexture. Painterly matter, now freed from its concrete association with the figurative, has been growing more and more into an autonomous factor of the pictorial impact. We can see the manifestations of the nonrepresentational style in its various incarnations – from lyrical abstraction to art informal . These tendencies, which have naturallyl ong been part of twentieth-century art, ought to be analyzed and appraised in the specific context of the development in Bulgaria in the latter half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, we can observe displayed in a number of paintings a seemingly opposing tendency, that which gives precedence to the ‘conceptual ' principle in building the pictorial representation. The image seems to have lost its previous ‘innocence' and is being charged with signs and meanings, which can be decoded at a certain ‘meta- level ' of perception, with the context playing a decisive role in the process. This trend is being realized mainly in the ‘multiplanar' dialogue of painting with photography, television, the video and Internet. What we are talking about is the new ‘iconosphere' surrounding the present-day artist. The principles of constructing such a type of pictorial image, whereby the semiotic reading displaces the elaborate symbolism or the contemplative train of associations, constitute the basic characteristics of this tendency. We may include here, with certain reservations, the works of those artists who have a penchant for the parable or the pictorial metaphor and remain attached to the visual transposition of traditions that are seen as a sui generic embodiment of the national cast of mind and social psychology.

Between these two trends there exist a number of intermediary art forms, which is indeed proof that all attempts at categorization are from the outset doomed to failure. Thus for instance the conceptual approach is often evident in non-figurative works and may find expression in the very manner of handling the painterly texture and leaving it to ‘speak' for itself, seemingly without the painter's involvement.

An exhibition, however painstakingly mounted, can hardly be expected to present in all their richness the quests and finds that reflect the diversity of a country's pictorial school And anyway, the so-called national physiognomy is a concept that seems ever more problematic in an environment of progressive globalization.

Apart from the multifarious reflections and reactions that such an exhibition is bound to call forth, it does bear testimony to the fact that the painting as a work of art in Bulgaria, changing as it does in step with the rapidly changing world around us, is viable and capable of rising to the challenges posed by the new forms and multimedia technologies in the constantly expanding universe of the visualarts.

Chavdar Popov

Professor of Art History

St Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia