About Stoyan Kutsev
Stoyan Kutsev is of the generation that entered the artistic life in the early 90-ies, and in the utmost degree passed through the tensions during the relay of socio-cultural models laid down by the political and economic changes in the country. The works of Stoyan Kutsev enter in the processes of transformation and renewal of the new Bulgarian painting, of extension of its formal and rich limits, of pre-formulation of its traditional status. His development outlined a complex trajectory - from deeply intimate experience of painting with “classical” values: complex color, proven hue, rich texture and plastic vibration, passed through problematization of the picture by laying late modernistic pathos in the context of the modern post-fashionable culture, for to reach in recent years to a purely conceptual approaches and solutions. A student at the latter class of Nayden Petkov, an accomplished painter, Stoyan, with the gift of endowed sculptor,enters internally focused and consistent in the depth of painting expression, into the richness and the multidimensional system of the plastic idiomatic expression.
This predetermines his development towards a final precision, informal articulations. So his painting is included in the activity of one, to a large extent, compensatory to master of language formula, intuitively felt and acquired from the practices of the abstractionism and the informal. In the 90-ies, in the development of the local art scene, this trend determined for a significant part of Bulgarian artists, ability to overcome the prevailing norm in the traditional understanding of painting and picture. During this period, the activity and the value of creativity due to Stoyan Kutsev are included in the specific process of seeking new ways of Bulgarian painting for accelerated mastering of new plastic and conceptual articulations, for the entry in a mode of a comparability of what is in the museums of the west. What characterizes Stoyan’s achievements in this direction is: sophisticated sensitivity towards surface and structures, graded rich tonality and extremely refined sense of color.
In the works of Stoyan Kutsev after the second millenium, increasingly often in the plastic and semantic structure are interwoven digits, letters, numbers, barcodes, signatures, indications of date or time - The signs of rationalism, pragmatism and digitization. These indications, imposed on the abstract canvas, of the picture move aside its high transcendental horizon, and draws him nearer to the truism and the concreteness of today. Thus the paintings are rather “inventory” exhibits, witnesses to something, that we have a vague memory, something that have lost its initial meaning and depersonalized. In the cycle “exhibits” on the symbolic indications of universal categories is imposed an “archived” imprint of a letter or digit. In “monotronics”, the four monochrome panels of the polyptych are dated in the order of the creation time. In the series “monitor”, the ordinary well-known digits of an electronic chronometer, set a specific time - hour, as if are paradoxically printed on a structured equal black - abstract symbolization of infinity and timelessness. The mixing and the confrontation of plastic and semantic codes of a different order, complicates and conceptualizes the painting of Stoyan Kutsev, moves aside the initial late-fashionable active of the form to a subtle ironical, post-fashionable articulation. Conceptional is The author’s behavior in the “composition of 9 modules” /n - options/; “Barcode”, “To the voyeur misanthrope”, in which the image in structure is redefined as an object with its own spatial being, and the painting, with its plastic content is included as a cultural code in a new conceptual text. Text that problemizes, somewhere with nostalgia, elsewhere with irony, the loss of meaning, relativization of the contents, their truism and compromise.
The anxiously self-conciousness of the author escalated to express dramatic value collision in “Where am I?” – Retort by Sartr. The work is a digital photo image of the artist himself – naked, ritually erected, - Frontally bare and painted with white dough. Typical actionist behavior in the tradition of beuys, with the symbolization of materials, ritualization of actions and gestures,and placing the author, his ego, in the center of the brought out summary - metaphor. Mastering new plastic and design codes, Stoyan Kutsev seeks adequate advanced means, new technologies and materials for to articulate his artistic reflectiveness. “Digital portrait” and “press -card”, use photographic technique to “document” the exquisite shift and inconspiciousness of the contents of modern man. “Portrait of bojana” decided as collage, print, wallpaper and multiplied on T-shirts, meaningful - The projections of the individual in social space, as here the conceptual decision uses the practices from the experience of pop-art.
Especially strong, with its mental activity and modern sound, are the prints on aluminum - with suppressed excess, with a hidden in the metallic lustre human drama, constrained scream, appeal, deafen pain or protest. Strange metal and fluorescent aesthetic image, even stronger expresses the modern collisions of our mental and spiritual living / non-living modeled in the technology-information environment.
Stoyan Kutsev in recent years expanded the panoply of plastic and conceptual means, for to express the variety of his artistic reflectiveness - provoked by the ambiguity of the questions, before which we are faced by the present. Notwithstanding the change of materials and approaches, the points of views and thematic directions, in the depths of his internal content and warmth, the works bear the seal of his personality, of his mental and spiritual sensitivity. Today, in the specific conditions of the Bulgarian art scene, with a parallel existence and confrontation of different ideas and articulations, is outlined with particular acuity the need and the possibility of a new quality realized reflection, a new responsibility for free choice and positioning. Got on in the years of his maturity, got over the attitudes plastic / conceptual, moving freely in a wide range of artistic tools and ideas, Stoyan Kutsev still continues seeking and experimenting for to prove the opportunities of his creative potential and responsibility of his artistic choice.