Bozhidar Kozarev rarely shows his works and, besides, they dwell mostly in foreign collections. The exhibition at the Krug Plus Gallery is simultaneously a retrospection of plastic generalisations reaching purified geometry and a presentation of the latest achievements and praise of the nude.

His male and female nudes are intermediaries that give us the privilege to touch an inner world striking with its association between fragile delicacy and inner tension. The absorption some of them portray is especially striking. Absorption that takes us back to the Renaissance man’s perception of the world but also aware of Orthodoxy’s deep contemplativeness. This is why Bozhidar Kozarev’s figures are endlessly far away from the usual use of the nude to portray eroticism. Just the opposite – they are memories of the times before the original sin, evidence of states of the human spirit in closeness to the harmony of the Divine. Preceding the rhetoric of subject-matter, preceding the intellectual play on symbols. They touch a state of pure creative contemplation unburdened of the drama of doubts and the comedy of notions.

 

Krassimir Iliev