RASSIM® | Unfinished Works 2024–2007 15.05.2024-10.06.2024 An artist’s career in today’s art world depends not only on the artistic qualities, visual decisions, and conceptual pursuits in their work, but also—to a great extent—on how it is presented and on the formation of a certain “aura” around the exceptional character of the artwork and its author. This strategy is well accepted in the context of Bulgarian neo-conceptualism and, at the beginning of the 21st century, RASSIM® is already among the well-known Bulgarian artists. He has taken part in prestigious international forums, has been featured in Western publications on contemporary art, and has managed to turn the author (i.e., himself) into a carefully transformed—or more precisely, “corrected”—work of art. Behind this well-polished calling card of the professional artist stand many experiments and diverse technical contingencies which, due to their transitional nature, usually remain in the shadow of the realized projects and completed works. Therefore, it can be said that the present exhibition offers an unconventional solution—it includes unfinished and previously unshown works begun after 2006, during a period when the artist was seeking the form of his return to painting after more than a decade of work with so-called alternative media 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 display, because they are part of the aforementioned transformation in the artist’s practice and are completely unfamiliar to the public. The acrylic paints used and the work based on preparatory drawings are atypical solutions for RASSIM®’s later painting series, and even if we assume that these two paintings are an ideational continuation of the project “Corrections” (1998/1996), they are also evidence of the new formal searches the artist was undertaking at that moment. This deliberate substitution of medium can also be found in the most recognizable work included—“Self-Portrait” (2024/2015/1995), first published as an action in the magazine “Izkustvo/Art In Bulgaria” in 1995. Besides not sharing the photographic realism of the original image, the exhibited self-portrait differs from his other painterly interpretations because of the collaged kinesiology tape—a sign of the physical strain placed on the artist’s body. An important accent in the present display is also the painting “Et in Arcadia ego” (1630/2016) after Nicolas Poussin, which represents the next period in RASSIM®’s work—from 2006 onward, the artist paints with organic materials and natural pigments such as urine, salt, burnt engine oil, petrol, and blue stone. Regardless of the exact compositional replication of the original, this work from the “Old Paintings” series can be considered “unfinished” because of the sketch-like character of its painterly development, the freer treatment of the figure, the background, and the neglected specificity of detail. Such a grounding of the author before the public is rare in contemporary art, because to a great extent the aforementioned “aura” already stems from the mystery of genius, from the work in the studio hidden from all viewers, and from the illusion of near-creation-like perfection—an illusion sustained by institutional standards in the art world. That is why this time—without the yellow gloves from a magazine cover, but with white gloves and directly from his studio—RASSIM® provokes with a candid look at unfinished and incomplete, yet carefully preserved over years, painted works and preparatory drawings. We should ask whether unfinished works have a legitimate place in exhibition halls, or whether such attempts are an exotic curiosity, valuable only to researchers and narrow specialists. In this institutional case, one can give the principled positive answer that in today’s art world everything is subject to legitimation—especially if it comes into the field of vision of historical scholarship. And precisely because final conclusions are the privilege of art history, I believe that within this exhibition—freed from scholarly commitments—we may allow ourselves to form a preliminary and partially aligned notion of RASSIM®’s “unfinished works”. Ivan Stefanov * The opening of the exhibition will take place on 15.05.2024 at 19:00 at ONE Gallery, at 1A Dyakon Ignatiy St.!
