Lyubomir Savinov – the Great Loner

Crude plasticity and quiet sadness is what his paintings at the Circle + Gallery emit.

 

If it’s true – and I am convinced it is – that real art is lonely work, then Lyubomir Savinov is among the great loners in contemporary Bulgarian painting. On the one hand, his all-round building and development is out of any common or group tendencies even in times favourable for the freedom of artistic manifestations – he remains aside from any popular acknowledgement. On the other hand, his personality and his behaviour of an artist turned inward to a world of his own, away from the public, unshared, seem to have helped him (with his will power and personality, of course) to preserve and keep his art from all those both pleasurable and enslaving instants of shared artistic love we all strive for. When we realise their price (if we get as far as realising it), however, it’s too late!

Regardless of the large scale exhibition at the Shipka 6 Gallery from a few years ago where we got quite a glimpse of this extraordinary work, popular tunes continue to stay in the public consciousness longer than such art’s expressive and crude power.

I have to admit that although I had only seen a small part of Savinov’s work, he has always inspired respect in me with his synthetic plasticity, depth and strange melancholy. It was only two weeks ago, however, that I took a surprising “stroll” and discovered for myself the dramatic fate of a stoic attitude that had been building the edifice of work devotion unparalleled in the Bulgarian spiritual architecture day after day. That is when I saw a two-floor house full of more than a thousand paintings (serious compositions and portraits, at that, and not just ephemeral works). I looked through a large exhibition in his study and was literally shocked by the thousands of drawings at his home that had accompanied his development in a sequence acquiring meaning from plasticity and content point of view in a historical, emotional, psychological and spiritual personal world; that is when I discovered a sculptor of expressive and organic structural form. As if from a sad and strange world these lonely figures emerge, resigned, intense, and grand in their simplicity and purity; powerful heads – monumental, classically complete, analytical and expressive, structural interiors, compositions where mankind seems to be moving from creation to ruin – a world beyond the appearances of form, living in its own form, in its own space, in its own time – a time of illusions, hopes, sorrows, and timelessness…

I have come across some difficult authors – some of them difficult for the ones around them, others difficult for themselves; some were carrying the barrier in front of themselves as a form of self-defence, others were suffering from complexes because of unrealised ambitions. Fortunately, without being one of the easy authors and interlocutors (one talks to him mostly in one’s mind), Savinov has accepted to talk to the truth of his paintings although with difficulty – and that truth needs no introduction – because it is deep, sad, and bright with its purity and sincerity.

After quite a lot of efforts and reservations, Savinov agreed to this exhibition – more as a way to socially mark his existence; not for the sake of himself, but for the sake of Bulgarian spirituality’s dignity.

As far as those who will discover Savinov’s art now, I believe they shall not remain indifferent to the crude plasticity and silent sorrow filling up his paintings. As far as those who already know him to a certain extent, I believe on seeing his paintings they will again and in a new manner rediscover the dignity of an attitude and the depth of a world that gives meaning to the efforts of anyone who has been initiated into the life of painting.

And finally, I would like to believe that this exhibition at the Krug Plus Gallery is a path leading to that forthcoming exhibition where the whole of Savinov – with his paintings, sculptures, drawings, and engravings – will reach us!

 

Svetlin Russev