Preslav Kostov’s "Over the Fence" exhibits a blurred, ethereal composition with intertwined nude figures, enveloped in a cool, muted palette. The painting blends human forms, creating a sense of motion and distortion that echoes the surrealism of Francis Bacon. Its soft blending and overlapping give the impression of figures suspended in a dreamlike state. Kostov’s work explores themes of identity and liminality, drawing from personal and historical context, and reflects on the experiences of displacement and cultural intersections. ...
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. ...
