Dear Nikolay
A grotesque joy to wear.
I told you hand. You showed me hugs.
From there on we exchanged.
I’ve just read in a text that landscape paintings were a way to avoid emotions. I don’t agree. In every landscape there is a shift from real to potential, there is light and wandering time, there are always horizons even those not seen.
A set of signs. Usually determined but even that stays open.
I’ve wanted my hands to find back to lines and shapes and bodies. By lighter and darker, by color and by aim. No command-Z nor glossy glass. A different temptation. Curling air in the moment of decision whether to add another line or not. And if yes and if it goes wrong because it flattens a so far tension or expands a subtle shape into an unsubtle resemblance, so if it goes wrong: How many other lines to add until it becomes something again?
Fabric. Loosely hanged, open to wind and movement. Architecture along bodies. You know how to cut and add and layer and zip and leave out and puff. Therefore I wanted to give you my signs and my landscapes. Because I know you will use them with a different meaning, will shape them into different furs. Of creatures also I just start to know.
I layer time. Long, concentrated nights on a small table on a small chair, dim light. Brushes, paper, real black and gold. From there on skin of stones and others. Then I expand them from the reality of the paper into the possibilities of un-mattered space. Dust is betrayal of the eye. Every little grain or hair would un-illusion. I click and click and click until every smallest bit has disappeared and every trace of unwanted matter vanished from the signs. While making disappear the dust, my body slowly fainted too.
Every now and then I hear your voice on the phone. And I touch ground and plans and space again.
We walked for ten days. The preparation of our show was basically getting to know each other. To enlarge one’s language by another’s, it makes sense to start with undefined signs.
The exhibition “Landscapes, Alphabet” presents the first creative collaboration between fashion designer and professor Nikolay Pachev and artist Sarah Burger. The spatial installation was created by transforming Sarah’s small watercolor paintings into Nikolay’s large-scale collages and sculptural garments. These objects complement each other and explore new horizons in art, combining the aesthetics of landscape and fashion in a unique symbiosis.
