top of page

Lazy pass

The slogan "lazy pass" appears in a program text by Krassimir Dobrev and Svilen Stefanov, which they started writing in 2012, puzzled and apparently irritated by the mastication of the rewriting or superimposition of photo images in painting. The text, which suspects many modern authors in "ease" or even "scamming", was completed in 2018 and Krassimir Karabadzakov joined their thesis.

These authors are well-known to connoisseurs of contemporary Bulgarian art. Krassimir Dobrev and Krassimir Karabadzakov comming from the Disco95 group (including names such as Kolyo Karamfilov, Rumen Zhekov and Dimitar Mitovsky) from the 90s. The story of Svilen Stefanov leads us to another emanation of the scandalous prominence of the 90s - the capital group XXL, which may not need a special introduction, especially after last year's retrospective in the National Gallery.

The One Gallery exhibition contains a series of paradoxes set forth in the authors' texts, photographs and paintings. Paradoxically, the text is only seemingly manifested. Being deliberately frantic, at the same time it wants to be modern and “truthful" but also self-denying, by virtue of his theoretical bargaining, over the abyss of folly. And here, in the middle of the unpopular field of schizophrenia, the double-faced Janus graciously closes him in the envelope of a work with an autonomous code. That is precisely what this quasi manifest should read - it is a work itself, it is a language game, not a set of possible pragmatic prescriptions. The exhibited works are also deliberately eclectic, as the authors both show how they have painted photography in the past, how they are now photographing or "telling stories" about photography with the means of painting.

Desislava Zafirova

bottom of page