Mitch Brezounek is a French artist living and working in Bulgaria, who actively - and often with irony, sometimes reaching sarcasm - points out the obvious in his art. In recent years, he has created paintings in the style of surrealism or magical realism, which draw the eye from the integrity of the picture to the small detail playing out on the canvas. His approach to the figure twists, sags or tightens the human body into the dimension of the inhuman, which has become an allegory of supposedly well-known religious-fantasy plots. And yet his works set out disturbing perspectives.
In the artist's latest exhibition, presented at Doza Gallery, the works foreground archetypal themes and scenes – from the creation of man to his fall. It discloses the belief in the eternal human civilization and the pace of its destruction. In the spirit of French comics and the experiment of modern painting, the exhibition testifies to how tradition can be reinterpreted by suppressed hope. Brezounek's exaggerated bodies not only resist the boundaries of the painting canvas, but also seem to resist the picturesque reality in which they have fallen in an attempt to survive. In them, the possibility of lust, resistance, and persistence is revealed, but also humility and bearing one's own part before the tempest.
In "Horizon of a Declining Age", Mitch Brezounek poses questions that seem to have sunk into the context of discussions and anxieties related to politics and war today, but that is precisely why they are especially necessary – not as an escape from this reality, but as an attempt to see and make sense of the unclear forces and relationships that push the human imagination towards horizons of devastation. Mitch Brezounek’s "Horizon of a Declining Age" outlines the murky landscape of the day – perhaps, precisely the one that comes after today.
- Hristo Kaloyanov, curator
