Sculpture

Exhibition
PAVEL KOYCHEV
sculpture
28 May – 15 June 2024

“Rakursi” Gallery celebrates twenty years since its founding on May 28, 2024. To mark this special occasion, we invited the sculptor Pavel Koychev, who chose to show his early works in bronze from 1990-1991. Sculptures, some of which he has developed over the years in different materials, scale and context. Works that set the philosophy and plastic form of some of his later installations.
“Among the reasons for Pavel Koychev’s unique role in art today is overcoming the aesthetic distance between plastic and conceptual, so that his talent as a sculptor gives additional persuasiveness to the ideas with which he participates in the great cultural debates and above all in the one about transhumanism. But also, the opposite – the sculptor reveals the conceptual potential of the plastic itself, and it in his hands “testifies” how much original meaning is embedded in existence.
One of the approaches that Koychev uses for such “philosophizing in material” is the placement of his older plastic works in a changed context, creating a new work. However, there are also cases, such as the current exhibition at Rakursi gallery, when he relies to change the context entirely on the passing of time – he has the courage to face it, to demonstrate that it does not take away, but adds meanings to the messages of his works.
Now he presents 12 small sculptures from three emblematic cycles from the early 1990s – “Observer”, “Containers” and “Bell”. What they have in common is the derivation of the form as a “pure” spatial presence, beyond its articulation along the figurative-language line. As an expression of the Wittgensteinian tendency of the sculptor to be silent about what cannot be spoken about, it does not allow you to find an appropriate word in response to the question: what is it? It is a form that has no barriers and marks of locality, which in the three cycles respectively began to look, shelter and sound on its own. She looks at the “Observer” – searchingly, because her gaze belongs to the beyond, to the universal, to the nothingness that is the essence of things… And it reinforces both the morally disturbing and existentially encouraging feeling that someone you can’t see is watching you, following you unknown how and from where.
“Containers” shows another feeling characteristic of Koychev’s sculpture – that not only is it in the space, but it is also inside it, it is born there and only then is it “projected” outside as an inhabited void. The space “inside” ignites the desire to return to the womb in a psychoanalytic analogy with the return to the lost Paradise, and the most amazing thing is that Koychev satisfies it in later works such as “The Abode”. In them, form literally “opens doors” to symbolically shelter you in a timeless space with its inevitable defeats after the Fall.
This same “inside” in “Bell” makes the form a bell with its inherent religious exchange of sound between earth and heavens. But the bell-form (or chan) does not produce the sound, but portrays it, makes it appear in space, so that it does not disappear after it dies down – “cast silence” for that which cannot be spoken.

Prof. Georgi Lozanov