LAZY PASSABILITY is a project by the artists Krasimir Dobrev, Krasimir Karabadzhakov, and Svilen Stefanov, who, through text, photography, and painting, express their shared bewilderment and irritation at the widespread tendency in painting to copy and paint over photographic images. The artists are extremely well known to admirers of contemporary Bulgarian art. Krasimir Dobrev and Krasimir Karabadzhakov emerged from the high-profile 1990s group Disco ’95, whose other members included Kolyo Karamfilov, Rumen Zhekov, and Dimitar Mitovski. Svilen Stefanov’s history takes us to another embodiment of the scandalous fame of the 1990s—the Sofia-based XXL group, which needs no special introduction, particularly following its retrospective at the National Gallery last year. Such a symbiosis is exceptionally intriguing, given that during the 1990s the relationship between these groups could be described as decidedly cool. The shift in positions can perhaps also be explained by Krasimir Dobrev’s participation in XXL exhibitions after 2000. The phrase “lazy passability” appears in a programmatic text that Krasimir Dobrev and Svilen Stefanov began writing in 2012. The text, which suspects many contemporary artists of “taking the easy way out” or even of “fraudulence,” was completed in 2018, when Krasimir Karabadzhakov also joined them in advancing their thesis.
