Transition - Trajectories in Time

“Transition - Trajectories in Time“, a project consisting of two exhibitions by Prof. Stanislav Pamukchiev on the occasion of his 70th anniversary.; the second exhibition, “Depot 80“, 5–21 April 2023 at Arte Gallery, Sofia.

The question how great living artists influence their heritage is not rhetorical: it is momentous because it contains intuitions about the world in which their art will be living. It is precisely in the unrelenting perspective of the constantly changing nature of our connection with what we inherit from others, and what makes us significant in the temporal future of the present, where, in an astonishing way, the artist Stanislav Pamukchiev succeeds in challenging the ideas of his lasting and multifaceted art with the help of a truly phenomenal exposition illuminating the baring of the deepest structural unities of his art.

The project “Transition - Trajectories in Time“ is a monumental effort and a huge gesture of Stanislav Pamukchiev’s to all of his admirers. For his 70th anniversary, he chooses to present, in the three halls of the Shipka 6 Gallery, his works from the last two decades which are most difficult to exhibit and perceive, some of which have not been shown at all, and others have not been exhibited in this way. The drawings, the paintings, the objects and the complex, compound installations of Stanislav Pamukchiev’s are assiduously prepared sacred instruments for transcendental vision. Instruments in which the history of science, philosophy, theology and artistic imagination work together and in harmony so as to establish man’s special place in the Universe. The exposition entitled “Parallel Trajectories“ in the halls of the Shipka 6 Gallery has an exceptional function. In this exposition the weight of the world seems to have been “kept” beyond the longings for past presences and beyond the inevitable strivings to guess and generate future identities. The exposition is built from parallel monumental opuses creating the feeling of a grand “art sanctuary” beyond time and conventional space. Before us stands an artistic mega installation erected by a triumphant multitude of hidden essences. Everything happens on “the edge of the internality“ of art, the approaching of which threatens to transform the world around us and change us forever. The exposition is a challenge to those who insist on preserving their distance because they will be provoked to interact with “conjured images”. Even the hard marble floor where the viewers step is transformed into a shocking work of transparent perceptions and ideas that cannot be held or embraced. With no warning, the visitors are engulfed by an exhibition which acts as an intense organic illusion. Beyond the metaphysical polarities and procedures accompanying the cultural mythologies, the exploding charge of the exhibition opens up endless pathways for the human consciousness into the deepest and exceeding layers of the enigmatic territory called art.

The purity of the visual environment aims at provoking the forms of faith in the infinite amidst the limited and material. We know that the conscious and articulated connection of consciousness and the infinite is the creative instance that constitutes the romantic modernity. The romantic thinking about art arises exactly within the frames of absolute knowledge as a transcendental form of pure vision. The pure artistic self is present in the consciousness in a way completely differing from the way in which the objects are present in the consciousness. This is a significant moment for art after which it is transformed into an unachievable form for presenting the truth and what is impossible to present. In my position as an art historian, in this exhibition, I discover Stanislav Pamukchiev’s romantic figure precisely there, in the dramatic, utmost modernity, standing pensively on the shore of the world and on the boundaries of the trans-media state of post conceptual and post contemporary art, an artist deeply concerned about art as an opportunity that preserves the idealized essence of life, an artist reminding other artists about their role in their journey to eternity or, in the words of Gombrich, about the rediscovered power of the images to weave spells for the imposition of eternity.
“Depot 80“, Arte Gallery

Every art produces time: the time in which art lives, and the time in which art will continue to live. In this connection, the “Depot 80“ exhibition at Arte Gallery opens up an unusual window to the time of the 1980s. We have a chance to peek into the intimate existential world of an artist who has absorbed energy fields of hidden tensions and unasked questions to a world that was ideologically oppressed and historically read too quickly. Stanislav Pamukchiev’s paintings from that time reveal the wounded enraptured sensitivity of a lonely and engrossed expressionism experimenting with the eternal themes and taboos of world figurative painting. Every painting is an original escape and pain, but also a sweet victory in a battle won in a masterly way. Every painting from that depot is a way that starts entangling a separate maze. The exhibition creates a strange sensation of getting closer to intimate essences and original causes; but actually it takes us back to the multifarious functions and branches of the deep metaphors that run through all of the artist’s later work.

In the long run, the two parts of the imposing project “Transition - Trajectories in Time“ contend with the powers of individual self-knowledge. The viewers have the pleasure of witnessing Stanislav Pamukchiev’s inexhaustible ability to descend below the surface of the visible, turning art into an unparalleled means for a deep emotional and metaphysical revelation.