The Self-Explanatory Essence of the Material
We are talking 2015. Precisely 100 years earlier, the world of art and the world of painting in particular, shook in a powerful explosion, the detonation of which reverberated throughout Europe even stronger than the battles raging on the Western, and on the Eastern front. The bomb was laid in Petrograd by one Kazimir Malevich who, in an art gallery in Dobytčina, showed the very first abstract painting which sent humanity straight through the funnel into modern times: a black quadrangle on a white background. The painting did not presume to have any hidden meaning, it meant just what it showed, a black quadrangle framed by white, without any link to naturalism. For the first time ever since the epoch of the Renaissance and Alberti’s famous comparison, the painting was no more a Window on the World, neither was it just an image or illusionistic presentation of the Being. Out of a sudden, the picture had become an object-less object, made autonomous and obvious by merely existing.
Ludmil Lazarov’s art fits perfectly into this hundred-year-old tradition of self-explanation. His paintings are self-explanatory because of Things and Creatures that are just there and do not need to explain why they are there; they just are and that’s that. They fill our world like any other things and creatures. We do not ask whence and how, we do not need to search for significance or a right to existence; we just establish their presence, nothing more, nothing less.
Unlike the traditional subject of painting relating to the real context in a more-or-less complex and motivated manner, Ludmil Lazarov’s objective painting is self-explanatory. It emanates such invincible likeness to truth that it does not even occur to us to question it. Despite the deep layers of paint transforming the painting base into a 3D object, we still sense the transparency. Transparency not in the physical but in the ontological sense, for it is transparency of an object that does not hide a single thing but remains reassuringly within grasp.
I have compared paintings to landscapes primarily because of the horizontal orientation of their upper layer of paint. Such a naturalistic interpretation is an oversimplification, even though I have said that myself. For I truly believe Lazarov’s work should be discussed in the contexts of concrete art. Expressions like “a comparison to” and “associations with” would be completely out of place whenever we speak of his paintings. For they are not minimalized landscapes à la Paul Klee, neither are they images of wood bark, floor covers or wall paint à la Jean Dubuffet. While, at first sight, their surface may lead us to think that reality has been cut and then pasted onto a museum context, Ludmil Lazarov’ paintings will always remain paintings. In other words, they can never be “paintings of”. Neither can they be “images of”. Or “a translation”. Or “a window on”. No, those paintings of his are independent bodies, each with its own physical law that refers us to nothing else but itself.
However, I feel like disowning that particular type of limited reading, even though it is in the best style of art for art’s sake. For there is one thing I invariably see in those compositions, and it is: Time. Time just seeps through Lazarovs’ paintings. Minutes, hours, days, all invested by the artist in each and every painting, have materialised on the surface. Time, therefore, has transformed into a solid body, tangible, heavy and easy to manipulate. Suddenly, something else is also transformed. Suddenly, those self-explanatory objects made of paint, which are seemingly just slumbering in space doing no harm, transform into media, into instances of visualization of an external phenomenon. They seize the running time and fix it on the canvas, they catch the invisible and make it tangible and understandable. And the Viewer stands in front of them as a Wanderer who, stepping onto a rock, is able to study its historically formed layers and contemplating the sediments of the Ages is thrilled while being overwhelmed by respect.
Dr. Emmanuel Mir
Dϋsseldorf, June 2015
Dϋsseldorf, June 2015
Translated into English by Aglika Markova
Ludmil LAZAROV is a freelance artist.
Born in 1955 in Bulgaria. In 1985 he graduated in Painting in the first class of Prof. Ivan Kirkov from the National Academy of Arts, Sofia. In the period from 1991 to 2003 he lived and worked in Paris.
Now he lives and works in Sofia.
Born in 1955 in Bulgaria. In 1985 he graduated in Painting in the first class of Prof. Ivan Kirkov from the National Academy of Arts, Sofia. In the period from 1991 to 2003 he lived and worked in Paris.
Now he lives and works in Sofia.