The exhibition hall in Budapest street has taken only a small part of the works created in Yordan Katzamunski’s studio through the years. Perhaps it is more precise to say “in the studios” where the artist has worked – studios varying in size and space but always filled with strange poetic atmosphere and a lot of art. Each and every painting created there is like a part of a whole, an attempt at sealing in of a strange, elusive world existing somewhere beyond the material outlines of people and objects. The dramatic personae in this world are repeated – silhouettes of trees, dry flowers, empty chairs, the contours of mysterious women or rather – his paintings have preserved their silent presence. There hardly is another painter like Yordan Katzamunski who has brought the tonal construction of his paintings to such artistic perfection.

Here is what Svetlin Russev says about the artist: “In times when delicate dispositions are not very much in, Yordan Katsamunski has managed to keep and preserve his spiritual delicacy and innate purity; he never let worldly failures damage spiritual strings; he turned pain into beautiful spiritual effort and night into space of the spirit – the painting – the silence. The silence that contains everything – a scream of pain, and a suppressed groan, illusions unachieved and truths unsaid, unrequited love, windows open and endless chasms, and… loads and loads of humaneness…”

Yordan Katsamunski’s works are presented chronologically – the first one being a small landscape of a Pleven street bathing in light painted in 1958 when the artist was only 15. This landscape is followed by several paintings from his time at the Belgrade Arts Academy and the decades after his returning to Bulgaria up to paintings created just months ago. The gallery space has been transformed into a cosy ambient of a series of extremely picturesque screens.