I do this ritual every morning when I enter the studio, every morning
And then I do this, all of this, and to do this good luck as I told you and because
this one belongs to my wife, I always kiss this and I kiss her socks like this
Yeah I'm pretty superstitious
I know it's stupid
I mean it's you know all the time is because you try to keep control of things
In a way I'm a control freak, I'm a control freak
I moved to Sofia when I got married which was in autumn of 85 and since that
time, my studios they were here and in a way, Sophia is part of my life
Yeah this was my - you see,
the big window, the right-hand one, this was our mural painting studio
Let me call the dean to give us the permission to enter inside
And this is absolutely the same as it was in early 70s
I entered here in 75 and I graduated in 81
This is the mural painting studio
And this is me, look at me as you see it yeah it is the
same floor and my hair is almost the same
I mean it was a very conservative education
But I still use, from my old professor Mito Mito Ganovski,
a saying, which was something like this: 'You, as an artist, it doesn't matter when you
enter an architecture, even if they built architecture especially for your work of
art, you're always the second first this architecture as soon as you obey that
rule there are no problems, at least for me
My most famous or infamous piece is called 'Top Secret' [1989-90]
In this piece,
I was telling the story, a very personal story, which was like a real burden for me for
a for a long time.
When I was in third year of the Academy, I was recruited by the Secret
Service in Bulgaria.
It was mainly kind of really talking about my fellow
students. What kind of artists are they? Are there good artists? They don't have
contacts with religious sects and so and so
And I was telling them very obediently
and I felt I was something like the Bulgarian version of James Bond
But in 83, I said: please, no, I don't really want to be used anymore please
I still believed in socialism but then, step by step
thanks to Perestroika time, which started in the summer of 85, I started kind of
realising in what I'm living in
And I made at least two paintings which were dedicated that story
You see me with with the silhouettes, supposedly the Secret Service, holding this man down there
And there is a little bit of a hope, this kind of a slightly brightened
future but this one is still really really, really black
You have this burden,
you try to take out that burden and make at least these two paintings then
you do this piece 'Top Secret' and it's a kind of a unique situation
There is no such a dumb person who without being threatened to be disclosed
[would] just reveal this
But, as soon as they done this, I had the feeling that there are no
barriers anymore in front of me, that I could do whatever I want
View to the West became a sort of a legend, in a way, in contemporary Bulgarian art
It was done during an exhibition called the 'Earth and Sky', which happened
on the roof terrace of the official union artists
So my work was consisting of this telescope, which was mounted on something
So here is the parapet
Here there was a nice bronze plate; label written 'View to the West'
and then you you do that and then you look at and you see really the
big red ruby star very beautiful, by the way, and this is exactly the West from
the Eastern block. Before, looking to the West that means you look into the
capitalism, the desirable paradise or whatever but then - okay you're looking to
the West, this West becomes closer but what actually becomes closer and you get
even more attracted by, like swallowed by, is the red star
It took some time,
when I kind of convinced the art world that all of this visual diversity is
done by one person and it is by one person because there is a common
attitude behind that
And now when people ask me what I'm doing I say usually:
'I'm telling stories in space'
Can you read it?
[Cameraman]: It's very small
[Complaining that it's too small]
Usually we think that the white cube is something which is ideal, it's perfect
perfect place to exhibit two or three dimensional artworks but when you come
closer you realise that actually it's not perfect, you have little cracks, you
have little bubbles which they could become like a really nice valleys or
little hills that my little fellows could live there
I'm really using that
principle which I learned back in my murals and this is also a mural
I'm using the space
[A LIfe (Black & White) 1998 - ongoing]
The idea comes from 98. You have two painters: one is with white paint,
the other one with black paint and these two painters, they're following
each other so all the time, half of the space should be black, half of the space
should be white
I think the title explains quite a lot, it says:
'A Life (Black & White)', so the things become like real life. The black,
presumably, the bad things they cover the white, the good things and vice versa
And you realise that it's real absurd what you are doing but you keep doing it
Just what we do, all of us, living on that place called Earth