Reflections on a Chamber Exhibition
“Art is not for liking!” – a quiet smile, a hidden, almost playful gaze… Was it truly playful? I hold my breath. These words touch something within me – something vulnerable, deep, and entirely my own.
I cross the threshold of the Varna City Art Gallery. This encounter moves me; I feel a tremor I haven’t felt in years. At the end of the long corridor, a white plaster figure glows before me. To its left and right are two small halls. It feels like a cross – the long corridor and the two side halls at its end. And the white figure, crucified upon it.
The exhibition is a collaboration; the two halls house two artists from different generations. Continuity. The younger is a colleague; the elder is my Teacher – the man I love and revere in my heart as a spiritual father.
The Worlds Between
In the left hall, there is a single work – a large-scale installation placed directly on the floor, and behind it, a video projection of a performance involving this same piece. The work has three levels, like three worlds – the upper, the lower, and our own, cast between the two. Its initial form resembles a sarcophagus or a coffin; then, in the video, I see Ivaylo opening the metal wings of the “sarcophagus,” and a staggering amount of slag pours out onto the middle level. This happens once more, the slag pouring onto the lowest world – the gallery floor. The metal coffin remains open, empty, its purpose fulfilled. This is how it lies in the Varna gallery – only the content is gone. With its two open wings, it too reminds me of a cross – lying on the floor, hollowed out, painfully vulnerable.
I pass the white figure again and enter the right hall. Angel’s world. A world I know nothing about and do not seek to question, but one that opens a portal to my own. There, I can wander, search, weep, and rejoice, experiencing every untouched and unknown corner that this room illuminates within me. I see millennia of human fates unfolding. Collages that, like giant puzzles, assemble torn fragments of tormented souls – lonely portraits built from pieces of suffered or joyfully lived moments. I find myself wishing to be whole like that, gathering my own torn parts against the black background of the “Otherness” beyond. These lonely collage-souls are everywhere around me, simultaneously present and absent – here in the now, yet elsewhere, in another time-space where we are not.
The Double Cradle
Angel points to the central sculpture, leading me to it. “It is read most clearly from here,” he says, gently swaying the two small cradles perched one above the other – and then he disappears. I remain beside this “Double Cradle” – a motif that appeared in his work in 1978, the year I was born. I try to guess what is “written” in it, to find the skill to read it. I don’t believe I ever will, so I give up; instead, this Cradle begins to flip through my own pages. I see the Mother, the larger cradle, positioned lower as if to support, protect, and carry the smaller one in her arms. And the smaller one, the Child, perched on top, trustingly allowing itself to be “rocked.”
The two never actually touch. Even when swayed together, their different sizes and weights cause their movements to instantly diverge; their paths never intersect. Is it not the same here as with the collages – or is it just the same within me – the primal loneliness of human existence and the inability to truly touch even those closest to us? The two cradles soar above one another in a slowly fading motion, destined for the natural striving of all things toward rest.
The Return
During the opening remarks, I learn that the white figure between the halls was begun 40 years ago, with work continuing until just a few days ago. At the end of the evening, when the gallery has grown quiet, I return to it. Truthfully, I hadn’t paid it much attention at first. Its head is as if exploded. The whole figure is like an explosion, as if pieces have been torn and cut from it. And yet… I feel it so whole, gathered quietly in its own hushed whiteness. What is it that keeps it from falling apart? And what is it that draws us back, again and again, to something old and painfully familiar?
As I write, I keep wondering who this woman is. Is she a Muse? A Goddess? A Mother? Or simply a woman? I will never know, and I don’t think I want to – for then her trembling whiteness would fade. She is a delicate white plaster figure harboring a fragment of the human spirit. That restless, irreconcilable, ceaseless urge to be, to connect, to create, to destroy… to rejoice in God and in the human.
No, art is not for liking.
It is so that within it, within this white plaster figure, we may encounter another human being, with whom we can silently recognize and share our meaning, our creation, and our human imperfection. To share our loneliness with the loneliness of another – even if only for a moment, before the “cradles” diverge forever.
Sofia, 21.04.2025