Although if You Ask Me, There Are No Quiet Riots

Although if You Ask Me, There Are No Quiet Riots / Въпреки че всъщност тихи бунтове няма

oil on canvas, 20 x 20 cm, Anton Terziev, 2024

Part of Quiet Riots series оf drawings and paintings (2019-)

Photo: © the artist
Courtesy the author

Title credit: Svetoslav Todorov - correspondent, editor and writer

Although if You Ask Me, There Are No Quiet Riots / Въпреки че всъщност тихи бунтове няма - oil on canvas, 20x20 cm, Anton Terziev, 2024

Part of Quiet Riots series оf drawings and paintings (2019-)

Photo: © the artist
Courtesy the author

Title credit: Svetoslav Todorov - correspondent, editor and writer

After Timm Ulrichs, THE END, 1981

Although if You Ask Me, There Are No Quiet Riots / Въпреки че всъщност тихи бунтове няма - pencil and acrylic drawing on oFabriano Artistico paper, 28 x 29 cm, Anton Terziev, 2024

Part of Quiet Riots series оf drawings and paintings (2019-)
Photo the author
Courtesy the author

Title credit: Svetoslav Todorov - correspondent, editor and writer

...

I don't know in advance exactly what a painting of mine will look like when I'm at the beginning of it. Its finished image is not in my head, it's more in my hand. I look for it while working with the brush. It's usually a long process. The brush strokes crawl, chase or rather gravitate around my idea of the image. The image doesn't "stay" fixed either. The lines of these strokes are short, nervous, persistently incised, I would say rough in the curves that overlap, diverge, layer, draw a line and build or erode the form - both colour and structure.

The color suggests its texture, the one from which I will experience the most satisfaction. Quantitatively, paint serves my needs for color - it needs to vibrate "unlocked" for development. By development, I mean its correspondence with the adjacent stain and its correlation with everything else within the work. The effect of this is a specific anxiety, nervousness, and state of drama, insofar as the above is part of a visual conflict and meaningful node.

Yes, color comes with its shape (its body), and from there follows its volume and specific presence and location. Color is form, once optically by definition and a second time, for me, a volume tactilely tangible and physically present (objectified) as mass. I can say that my pictorial compositions are made up of volumes in different proportions.

Work on a painting continues as long as the idea of it does not weaken its compulsive grip. The idea is subject to discipline in realization. I control the infinite possibilities (for color) with quick decisions dictated by trained intuition. I embark consciously on paths I will abandon. I lay colors that are "dead ends." Attacks of sorts, forays into the field of the new. I test the territory I will set out to conquer in a series of short but repeated sessions. A complete and perfect disillusion that brings me into (successful) working mode.

Painting a picture is too long a journey. A journey that, metaphorically speaking, bites its tail. It causes me fatigue, but it also brings the respite of a temporarily relieving delirium. I mean the trance of the millions of brushstroke repetitions over the same "refrain".

I understand the pictorial field as a testimony to the road and the time "spilled" along the way. The painted is an archival document of the form that this time takes "spilling" onto the path.

The problems of realizing a painting are not technical. They are only related to the endurance of patience that I am willing to give to it. I compare patience to service, service to the idea. How far am I willing to go in my patience? In each of my next paintings, I do believe further, or closer - the poles overlap.

What confronts the viewer of my painting is my play with time, frozen in a seemingly ready and comfortable cast, the landscape of which may deceive, or may reveal deceptions. In any case, it is a hole in the coordinate system of the mind.
My painting is that of an anti-impressionist. It marks in a markedly expressive way certain states of obsessive belonging.