LYUBEN GENOV, Scattered faces – paintings 12-26.09.2023

LYUBEN GENOV

Scattered faces

paintings

from 12 to 26 September 2023

“Scattered Faces” is the latest solo exhibition of Lyuben Genov in Sofia. It is a continuation and a conversation about the author’s new works and about his improvement as an artist in a relation with another of his exhibitions – “Scattered Spots”, shown 14 years ago.

Lyuben Genov’s paintings are a whirlwind of color and shades. They are mysterious, magical and metaphorically spectacular in the spirit of „informel“. Created like at once, with speed and decisiveness, they still do not lose the slender compositional framework and internal organization. Through the gesture of repetition, in the multiplication of images and rhythmic tonality, Lyuben Genov reaches a meditative potential, an unusual and mysterious logic.

In the cozy space of “Arte” gallery, between the colorful walls stand the large-format canvases next to several series of very small paintings. An illusion of new spaces creeps into these two-dimensional worlds of color stains and spills on the canvas. The colored surface becomes a link between the artist’s imagination and the visible, the transgression of which leads to hidden images – those of faces without features, name and essence. The scattered faces are disembodied, fragmentary, barely hinted.

Sometimes the paintings of Lyuben Genov act not as independent objects but as pieces of something larger, part of a puzzle that can only be assembled by its creator. But the artist offers

a solution for unraveling- a head is outlined behind the spots, but the viewer does not recognize a face, his features remain unclear. In the art of Genov a portrait is not a portrait, a landscape is not a landscape. The author does not give a clear code for reading his paintings. There are a lot of improvisations, but many solutions too. What remains for the viewer is to intuitively follow the artist in his latest play of colors, rhythms, shapes and dissonances.

Dr. Nadezhda Dzhakova