Finally Forward Painting by Milko Pavlov 18/10 – 22/11/2022 Milko Pavlov’s painting seems to have been formed in a time before language—before even the beginning of human history—when earth and sky had not yet undergone their separation from one another: the rift that would allow the creation of the world, yet would also open an eternal chasm between them and the impossibility of attaining wholeness. The landscapes of his brushstrokes create a space we might define as a world, but not as reality. Reality is full of concepts; it is defined through language, structured, analysed, a product of the ego and its self-awareness. Reality is human experience and culture—the secondary, already established body that has come to understand its nakedness and thus its mortality; it has constructed axes and cross-lines by which to grope its way forward and orient itself. The world is fluid and pure matter, the fabric of the absolute. Reality is a function of the human; the world is the fruit of the divine Logos. In a series of large-format canvases, the artist projects places that might evoke mountain landscapes, rocky shores, the cosmos. Formed through an intuitive use of colour (intuitive because intuition is a product of the subconscious, and colourists—as Milko Pavlov defines himself—generally rely more on their sensing than on rationalisation, as it manifests in line, so to speak), the paintings seem to appear through the manifestation of an integral memory of the heavenly/the world of ideas, embedded in our collective memory. Milko Pavlov’s painting is as if it were solving the task of language, ceaselessly suffering failure in its attempt to articulate the absolute, to reach true knowledge. In the series “Finally Forward”, Milko Pavlov situates his painting in another time—one that is yet to be attained. The works are “dated” in years that have not come for us—2109, 2099, etc. (as opposed to the conventional reading of time—linear, Christian, the year 2022). Thus, in the author’s abstract landscapes, time is powerless, like the Garden of Eden, where human beings do not yet know their tireless action—there, where being is still whole. In this sense, his painting always remains somehow unattainable: it is here, present, yet it sends us elsewhere, reminding us of that place to which we wish to return. In the white cube of the gallery space—by itself a kind of temple meant to detach the visitor from the world of the vitally necessary and the practically useful—Milko Pavlov’s exhibition transcends the reality of the matter in which we find ourselves. The oil-on-canvas paintings are a bridge to the world of the invisible—their medium a conduit to the unsayable. With the support of the National Culture Fund under the “Annual Grant 2021” programme and the “Programme for the Recovery and Development of Private Cultural Organisations”. text: Boyana Dzhikova
