Daniel Dinev presents a retrospective at Impression Art Gallery
Daniel Dinev draws inspiration from nature, borrows faces from the people around him and from his nocturnal dreams, refracts them through his own sensibility and presents them in unusual modernist paintings. The exhibition “Borrowed Faces”, opened at Sofia’s Impression Art Gallery, is the artist’s sixth solo appearance and a retrospective of his work. It includes paintings from the 1990s as well as very recent works, allowing viewers to trace the changes in his style and in the palette of his oil paintings — from dark tones toward increasingly bright and abstract compositions. “With ‘Borrowed Faces’ we want to attract the attention of young people, to intrigue them and teach them to think,” gallery owner Lalka Ivanova and the artist told Monitor.
What visitors see in the exhibition stands somewhat apart from the mainstream of contemporary art. Perhaps because Daniel Dinev did not graduate from an academy, his works do not carry the stamps imposed in recent years. His art is free from the constraints of academic education and resists simple stylistic classification. Like the Surrealists, he takes fragments of images, hyperbolizes them and places them at the center of his universe. In other works he is closer to abstract modernism, as in “After the Long Sleep — Awakening”. All the canvases bear the imprint of a deeply emotional artist who can even paint “freedom” itself.
One such work is “The Blue Snare”. Looking closely, one may discover a bird and other forms. The artist explains that the work is very important to him: he did not sleep for two days while painting it and considers its composition and color among his most successful. The bird symbolizes the free spirit, yet even it can be caught in a snare. Another favorite image is the fish, appearing in works such as “Trinity” and “Changing Places — Rearrangement”, as a symbol of infinity and the sea. The “Family Walk” cycle reveals his attachment to family. He pays tribute to nature in the “Autumn Passage” series and in “Ugly Bird”, showing that something beautiful can also be found in what is ugly. Other notable works include the erotic “Obsession in Orange” and “The Year of the Horse”.
Art historian Dochka Kisyova-Gogova writes that, like the Surrealists, Dinev transforms his dreams into paintings; hence his interest in Salvador Dalí and in major names of Bulgarian art such as Jules Pascin and Georges Papazoff, whose work he admires without directly imitating it.
MARIANA TSVETKOVA
MONITOR NEWSPAPER
08.03.2014