Preslav Kostov's painting "Over the Fence" features a blurred composition of intertwined figures rendered in soft, muted blues and flesh tones, creating a dreamlike atmosphere. The figures lack distinct narrative elements but evoke themes of movement and entanglement. Employing a style reminiscent of Francis Bacon, with surrealist and automatist influences, the work captures a sense of dislocation and fluid identity. Kostov explores liminal spaces, reflecting personal experiences of immigration and identity formation within a historical and virtual context. ...
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. ...
