RASSIM® | Unfinished works 2024-2007 15.05.2024-10.06.2024 The artist's career in the modern art world depends on both the artistic qualities, visual solutions and conceptual searches of his work, and to a large extent on its presentation and the formation of a certain "aura" around the exceptional nature of the work and its author. This strategy was well accepted in the context of the Bulgarian neo-conceptualism and at the beginning of the 21st century RASSIM® was already among the famous Bulgarian artists, participated in prestigious international forums, was included in Western contemporary art publications and managed to convert the author (himself) into a carefully transformed or more precisely "corrected" work of art. Behind this well-polished business card of the professional artist hide many experiments and various technical conventions which, due to their transitory nature, usually remain in the shadow of the presented projects and finished works. Therefore it can be said that the current exhibition represents an unconventional solution - it includes unfinished and undisplayed works made after 2006, in a period when the artist was searching for the form of his return to painting after more than a decade of working with the so-called alternative medias such as photography, video and installation. In this line of thought, the two large-format canvases shown in the exhibition - "The Preferred Body" (2007) and "Separation from the Body" (2007) can be understood as central to the exhibition because they are part of the mentioned transformation in the artist's work and are completely unknown to the audience. The use of acrylic paint and the work on preparatory drawings are atypical solutions for the later painting series of RASSIM®, and therefore even if we assume that these two paintings are a conceptual continuation of the project "Corrections" (1998/1996), they are also a testimony to the new at that time formal pursuits of the artist. This deliberate replacement of the media is also found in the most recognizable among the included works - "Self-Portrait" (2024/2015/1995), first published as an action in the magazine "Izkustvo/Art In Bulgaria" in 1995. Except that it does not share the photographic realism of the original image, the self-portrait shown stands out from his other pictorial interpretations because of the collaged kinesio tape, a sign of the physical strain on the artist's body. An important highlight of the current exhibition is the painting "Et in Arcadia ego" (1630/2016) by Nicolas Poussin, which represents the next period in the work of RASSIM® - since 2006 the artist has been painting with organic materials and natural pigments such as urine, salt, burnt motor oil, petroleum and bluestone. Although an exact compositional replication of the original, this work from the "Old Pictures" series can be referred to as "unfinished" due to the sketchy nature of its pictorial development and the looser treatment of form, background, and overlooked details. Such a presentation of the author in front of the public is rare in contemporary art, because to a large extent the already mentioned "aura" derives from the mystery of genius, from the work hidden from all viewers in the studio, and from the illusion of almost non-artificial perfection - an illusion maintained by institutional standards in the art world. That is why this time, not with the yellow gloves from the cover of a magazine, but with white gloves and directly from his studio, RASSIM® provokes with a frank look at the unfinished and imperfect, but carefully preserved for years paintings and preparatory drawings. We must ask the question, do unfinished works have a legitimate place in the exhibition halls or are such attempts exotic, valuable only to researchers and specialists? This institutional case can be answered in principle positively - that in the world of art today everything is subject to legitimisation - especially if it falls within the field of historical science. And precisely because final conclusions are the prerogative of art history, I believe that within the framework of this exposition, freed from academic commitments, we can allow ourselves to form a preliminary and partially adjusted idea of ​​the "unfinished works" of RASSIM®. Ivan Stefanov * The opening of the exhibition will take place on the 15th of May 2024 at 19:00 in the space of ONE Gallery, address: 1A Dyakon Ignatiy Str.!