Preslav Kostov's "Hollow Beach" features a vibrant yet muted palette that intertwines flesh tones with deep blues. The composition is a chaotic yet controlled blend of distorted human forms, suggesting movement and tension. The painting employs techniques reminiscent of Francis Bacon, with a surreal and automatist approach that distorts reality. Layers and blurs add an ephemeral quality. Kostov's work draws from personal narratives and historical insights, exploring themes of identity and the immigrant experience, while reflecting on the boundary between the physical and digital worlds. ...
The many tangled figures of Preslav Kostov’s imposing paintings jostle against one another, groping and clutching, and stay suspended in action, as in history painting, but remain untethered from any specific narrative, any grounding element that may lend itself to easy interpretation. With a lugubrious palette drawn from Old Masters paintings, and a sense of figurative distortion recalling certain works by Francis Bacon, such expressions of painterly virtuosity at first obscure Kostov’s seemingly automatist approach to composition, both the surrealist kind, in the lineage of Andre Masson, and the sort of uncanny images produced in recent years by artificial intelligence programs. Whether referring to the bardo or the algorithm, these paintings seem to emerge from an interstitial space between aggression and eroticism, the actual and the virtual, the historical and the present – a liminality informed by Kostov’s own personal histories, his acute understanding of immigrant experience and identity formation. ...
