Krasimir Krastev – RASSIM®’s exhibition Salt presents 19 works specially created for one of ONE Gallery’s spaces over the past five years. The project explores the complex relationship between reality and the image. The exhibition features licked sculptural installations, video, and paintings created directly by the waves of the sea. The artist enlisted two hundred assistants in the process of creating this unconventional sculpture. RASSIM® makes organic matter paint! Whether it is the “gold of the body” (urine) or the “gold of the earth” (petroleum), matter submits to his skilful brush and paints. These are mainly portraits of collective memory, imbued with profound nostalgia. But in the paintings from the Sea Black series, RASSIM® no longer needs a brush! Like a postmodern scientist (or a premodern magician!), RASSIM® stands on the deserted seashore and seems to be taking samples or performing a sacred rite, thus making the sea itself paint. To paint without a brush, to paint through the sacred salt of its life-giving waters. There is something magical about these paintings. They radiate both serenity and menace. They offer so much to the imagination that I begin to envision another sea and another planet (somewhere in deep space!), where life is about to emerge from warm, salty waters… I have felt such tension—the tension of a primal founding, a primal event—only in Blake’s engravings of biblical subjects. In my view, in Sea Black RASSIM® achieves something that should be called cosmic sublimity: the spirit’s nostalgia for the organic body. Ani Ilkov
