Vasil Chakarov returns to the Loran Gallery. After the memorable chamber exhibition in 2019 with works filled with oil paints, we now see him in his element – ​​watercolor. The presented selection from a large series, created over several years between 1998 and 2000, recalls the main quality of the artist Chakarov, his variable plastic language. If we look at the beginning of his creative path in the 1960s and in the direction of his artistic searches we move through the decades, we will remember how diverse and even multi-directional in his searches with watercolor he could be. Against the backdrop of the soft sfumato in the "Quiet Land" cycle, as well as in comparison to the expressive color swirls of the "Enchanted Nature" series, the watercolors in this exhibition are completely different in style. They are another step towards new artistic challenges and are also interesting in that they show how the mature artist does not remain in the comfort of something achieved. On the contrary, he embarks on the next artistic adventure with renewed enthusiasm.

“Night in the Gardens” is a title suggested by the author’s title of one of the works in the series, which (we should note correctly) uses the diminutive “gardens.” Gardens are those small pieces of land that farmers cultivate and which the artist’s eye perceives as a picturesque (never the same) alternation of shapes and colors. Far away somewhere, here and there, the childhood memory of Vasil Chakarov as the village boy from his native Bagrentsi, helping his parents in the night watering of just such gardens, creeps in. The night becomes part of the memory, but now in the watercolors it is also a poetic character. Under its power, the moon scatters gold, the violet depths overturn the idea of ​​the ordinary and the visible becomes magical.

Anelia Nikolaeva