Stoyan Zikov

One year
Art cycle uniting sculptures, paintings and drawings created within one year (2021)
As an author, I am drawn to the idea of ​​expressing the emotion of the environment around me and the context of my existence. In the One Year cycle, one can trace precisely this creative process that took place in 2021. Some of the paintings represent the 12 months of the year. The others are individual reactions to thoughts and situations of the year and the artistic reflex provoked in me. The canvases are not illustrative, they are the result of pure emotion, a continuation of my search in the drawing. The figures carry a state of mind without imposing talkative anatomy. I create an artistic decomposition of the figurative form, turning it into a whole with the background environment together, building an object of aesthetic and philosophical value.
From a colorful point of view, each picture has its own color balance, again related to the reproduction of the emotion that I purposefully built. Mixed technique, the use of different types of paint and materials allows me to apply paint through different methods, whose consistency and individual characteristics, such as degrees of reflectivity from matte to gloss, transparency, pastiness allow me to maximize the expressive means of these visual theories. The way of applying paints and materials also varies from using different brushes, sticks, watering, spraying, using templates, etc.
There are two paintings that have a somewhat different fate, they were damaged during transport and their canvases were partially torn. For a while, I moved them from place to place, wondering if I should throw them away. One day I had already worked on all the canvases in the studio and from a purely technological point of view I had to wait at least 24 hours for them to dry so that I would not get any accidental and unwanted leakage. My eyes fell on the two torn frames and thinking about how sad their story was, I thought about those days when you get up and don't feel the day as pleasant and you have a great desire to go to bed and sleep again, but still the day goes by and you finally find out. that important or pleasant moments have happened to you and you are glad that you did not miss this day. I thought about unpleasant events in your life, for which you are currently wondering why they are happening to you and how unfair your fate is, but time passes and you realize that these moments have provoked you and led to extremely important decisions and moments. Then I decided that the fate of these paintings depended only on me and whether they would actually turn into paintings. We all know that tearing the canvas has long been foreign to art, so I started painting on canvases, thinking about how to make the tears in question an integral part of their existence, the meaning of their existence is to turn the defect into a reason to build and consciously implement context in the works.
The sculptural compositions of the cycle, despite their individuality and independence, exist creating specific interrelations and correspond both to each other and to the paintings and drawings. Like them, figurative sculptures dissolve into space, emotion and message are recreated through composition and sculptural dynamics, rhythm and pure plasticity, which I have been looking for in the last few years (since my work on World of Angels). Sculpture, which is not burdened with unnecessary volume, which builds and complements the space in which it is situated, is a theme of synthesis that has always interested me and has played a leading role in the construction of my works.
Drawings are my weakness, they are probably the purest kind of artistic thought, not a day goes by without me scratching any idea whether in a sketchbook, on a flying leaf or a napkin. Drawing has long become an independent creative discipline. Many contemporary artists express themselves mainly through it, and for me it has become the basis of my work. In the process of creating the drawings for the cycle of one year, I created hundreds of drawings, many variations of different poses, figures, animals, still lifes and landscapes. It was through the drawings that I discovered my personal affinity for the disintegration of the figurative volume and its transformation into a pure, poetic concentration, a kind of artistic, visual haiku. Mentioning haiku, I cannot deny that for these drawings I am inspired by the eastern ink drawings, the ikebana and the purity with which they convey messages.
As a conclusion to this explication, I can say that I am glad that this cycle successfully communicates with people all over the world from all continents, races and countries, for me this is a sure signal that I have touched something real and human.