Dimitar Genchev: Cover Story

"I seek a painting rich of images where the eye is triggered, surprised and irritated in various ways. More and more is looked at and discovered on each square centimeter of the canvas. My paintings recall several old shabby photographs glued onto each other. The viewer is tempted to find out what is appearing underneath the surface." - Genchev 

In his life-size paintings, Dimitar Genchev (1985, BG) alternates between different textures and intensities of materials such as oil paint and epoxy resins. As a virtuously skilled figurative painter, Genchev transforms the flat surface of his paintings into almost tangible, three-dimensional environments that are as wondrous as they are a testimony to the artist's abilities with his medium. He has a strong personal connection with the banal and intimate scenes in our everyday life and their hidden and hard to find beauty. This mundane subject matter is converted into uncanny and sometimes surrealistic scenes by the use of contrasting styles and techniques that appear alien to its surroundings. By changing rhythms in color, texture, structure and subject matter Genchev converts the ordinary into the extraordinary. 

Painting what he observes around him, sometimes extended with motifs he finds online, Genchev invites the viewer into his life in post-Communist Bulgaria. Genchev notes that ''if you observe things for a long time, you start to love them.'' So lovingly he captures how light touches the surfaces and structures of life, from sunlit rooms with outdated furniture, to soft skinned bodies, glazed ceramics and rusty iron or peeling walls. The paintings reveal a beautiful but strange atmosphere where figures and objects mysteriously appear from abstract clouds. Genchev visually narrates an open story and the viewer's imagination has the freedom and space to complete it. 

For this exhibition, Genchev presents a new series of paintings as an "attempt to create uncanny and spatial reality on a two dimensional surface". His process begins by spilling several layers of transparent paint and epoxy resin on to canvas or panel surfaces. Through this process the paintings become intentionally thick and layered, which exaggerates their spatiality and lends incredible depth to the imagery.  

This exhibition is supported by the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria.