In Preslav Kostov's "Over the Fence," the painting features intertwined, distorted human forms rendered in soft purples against a background of muted blues and earth tones, creating a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere. The blurred figures, suggestive of motion, evoke ambiguity and tension. Kostov's technique merges figurative distortion akin to Francis Bacon with elements reminiscent of AI-generated imagery, resulting in a haunting and liminal composition. This piece reflects Kostov's exploration of identity and existence, drawing from his personal experiences and the idea of living between 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. ...
