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The incisiveness of the pictorial message in Svetlin Roussev's paintings stems from the lucidity of thought, the depth of emotion, from his ability to give material form to human states of mind and feeling. In the diversity of these states - ranging from intimate lyricism to condensed tragedy - is reflected the manifoldness of human drama and the rich world of a creative personality. Svetlin Roussev shuns melodrama, avoids the ostentatious in the play of features and gestures, for he is aware that the externally effective is but superficial cosmetics which may disguise the absence of beauty, but can hardly create it. The painter looks for his discoveries in everyday life, in what is ordinary and commonplace. He knows how to observe the familiar from an inhabitual point of view, to reveal the customary in a startling and unexpected aspect, to raise the trivial to the fantasy of vision not through artificial inventions, but by penetrating to its intrinsic meaning, hidden behind the veil of the obvious. Here, the beauty of faces, figures and landscapes has nothing to do with prettiness and classical correctness. The artist apprehends beauty not as a physical appearance, but as essence, not as a charming envelope, but as a character. And that is precisely why he is able to express the inner beauty of an individual, or an experience, through the externally commonplace, the imperfect, even the homely. He does not imitate, but creates; instead of covering surfaces, he carves, as it were, the live form from within the inert matter, thus following the eternal principle which governs all conception and birth - from the grain to the human embryo. The objects and bodies in the paintings of Svetlin Roussev possess strength and substance precisely because they are not hollow forms, rendered through the play of light and shade on surfaces. Light itself acquires a singular materiality, because it is not a "developer" of the visible, but is inside the matter, because the objects, as if modelled in bright and dark, emanate their own inner light. Bogomil Rainov |
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