Much has been written about Nikolay Karadzhov, yet he always seems to have preferred the intimacy of his studio. The haven where he would work on his next new work as a kind of sacred rite. A painting in which light pierces the fabric of space and time to build a new image, a new world. Meandering between the aesthetics of surrealism and minimalism, the artist has arrived at his own visual language, which today has become his trademark. Although it should not be defined as unique, it is his, not because of its external characteristics, but precisely because of the delicacy of the meaning embedded in it. It is a purified space in which bodies, flowers, mushrooms, eggs, cherries and objects are harmoniously interwoven, as in a well-composed dance étude. And almost always a small sphere, an orb of meaning, casting, as if unreal, its shadow of doubt. A sphere like the sun, like the moon, which with its light will make the invisible visible, the empty full, and the distant near.
Under the tutelage of master of the brush Nenko Balkanski at the Academy of Art in Sofia, Nikolay Karadzhov, whether consciously or not, absorbed from his lessons one of the most striking manifestations in the work of the Kazanlak artist – the play on genre. Just as in Nenko Balkanski’s work, still life, nude, interior and portrait merge within the territory of the visual field to sound in a unified work, so in Nikolay Karadzhov’s work one can often see a refusal of being pinned down to one genre. And all this in the name of the meaning borne on the waves of light. Light – which physicists describe as a phenomenon with a particle-wave character—a stream of photons and at the same time a wave—is what excites the artist and finds its manifestation in each of his paintings. And as the British encyclopedist of the Baroque era, the great inspirer of Virginia Woolf and Borges, Sir Thomas Browne would write, ‘Light is the shadow of God!’ The shadow which the Demiurge would cast upon his most perfect creation, man. To illuminate his days, his path, his works. And it seems that in each of the works offered to us by Nikolay Karadzhov in his new solo exhibition, we can glimpse the shadow of God.
In today’s exhibition, you can see not only the tender female portraits, now deemed a classic of his work and which reflect his entire concept of the beautiful as a fundamental characteristic of art. Not only his preoccupations with our object world in all its transience, but also his latest variation on the theme of ‘Eleven Cherries’. Among the works shown here is one of the artist’s earliest creative attempts – Still Life from 1980, which was presented in the artist’s first solo exhibition, hung in the salon of the Union of Bulgarian Artists on Blvd. Ruski (today Tsar Osvoboditel) in Sofia.
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Nikolay KARADZHOV was born on 8 August 1950 in the village of Malchika (Pleven region). He graduated from the National Academy of Art in Sofia, majoring in painting under Prof. Nenko Balkanski. In 1979 he was accepted as a member of the Union of Bulgarian Artists. Between 1976 and 1977 he exhibited his works in a gallery in London, where he was active from 1997 to 2007. He has held a number of solo exhibitions in Bulgaria, England, Latvia and participated in general representative exhibitions in Russia, Romania, Finland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, and Mexico, among others. He has won national and international awards, and his paintings are held in dozens of state and private collections at home and abroad. Today the artist lives and works in Ruse.