THE SCREAM - Limited Edition of 5 Photograph

I had lost touch with the artist and his work. On my part, if we had to explain why this distance overcame us, I would state in my defense, the fact that my professional art writing and criticism virtually stopped in 2008, because its nature and form changed radically. I started writing only about those artists (only a few out of a hundred or more) with whom a personal relation of meaning had developed. On Iasen’s behalf, well, he could state his outsider status, the fact he is an English speaking Bulgarian living in the island of Grand Canary, and that he lives with his back turned to fashions, groups and fads. Yet, what is most important about this reencounter between artist and writer, is that Iasen Solokov has evolved new and challenging idioms of expression that are both the synthesis of past periods and the fruit of an ongoing commitment to his times and his world. A critical engagement that is concerned with our staggering indexes of waste production and environmental decay. His animated, almost automaton like sculptures, assembled out of F-18 scrap parts and other high tech precision machinery, mobile and electrified, are an eerie testimony of the present, set in a global race towards ever greater technological and digital power. It is a race that is supremely unconcerned about the origins of its raw materials and the effects these have, once they become toxic hardware. The destruction of life systems and atmospheres can be included in the agendas of countless more Kyoto protocols. In his studio, I saw both old style and formal portraits, masterful in technique and psychological penetration, and then, completely different studies of personality and psyche. Although still rooted in portraiture, these new images, gripping in their strangely hallucinatory psychedelic power, led elsewhere, to the symbolic and the supernatural, to the disembodiment of identity and the creation of phantoms. Art is always a mystery, not only to the beholder, but also to its creator. Iasen first visited the Island of Madeira with a geographical explorer who took him to remote, non tourist sites. His photography, an in-depth study of ancestral nature in undisturbed environments, was compacted with his central interest in the human body, the male and female nude. About this confluence of themes, the artist has said: “I see expression of human male and female bodies everywhere, especially in Nature. I remember when I was a very young boy, I loved lying on the grass watching the passing clouds forming all kinds of figures and images. At the same time, I see expression of the flora and the fauna in the human body. After all, we come from the same elements. We are part of the same family for good or for bad.” What I call his “rhizome” portraits, which make up his recent work, come precisely from this naturalism. Exerting mental and emotional pressure on the formal limits of portraiture and representation, nature and its assimilating forces have created root patterns, evolving out and into the faces of unknown, imaginary subjects, in part adapting ink-dripping techniques. The human soul, the individual’s identity, grows as a rhizome beneath the surface of the canvass, and it the artist that makes it visible. The integrating aesthetic of body and nature, the intersecting and intertwining patterns of natural vegetable forms and trophic tendencies, which were producing a new photographic iconology, suddenly changed course. And, this happened because that same unspoiled nature was laid waste by the destruction of Madeira’s worst forest fires, destroying, not only nature’s presence but the houses, and the farms, and the livelihoods of so many inhabitants. Iasen merged this tragic inflection with the pure black and white imagery of his Hasselblad camera work, (there are also colour photographs), and embarked on a dramatic and distressing journey into the plight of human fate. He didn’t turn up in the fire ravaged woods to make a documentary report. He appeared later and reworked what he had already conceived. These new series conform different motifs and groups of images. Variations of grief, and the integration of natural life forms (trees and ferns mainly) in the context and background of destruction and its ruin. We see a man mad with anguish and despair that has become the transparent vector of natural tragedy, his luminous, phantasm like body gradually reclaimed by invading mosses and ferns. His images compose a holocaust narrative. He has been crucified on the iron grill of a burned out window, he has been bound by barbed wire and chained by branches. He yells out helplessly subdued. A young woman, squats naked amid charred bushes, or has her silhouette absorbed by the devastated fabric of her house’s walls. She had previously become part of nature’s triumphant beauty, in that her naked torso had literally emerged out of, and grown into, a moss covered tree. The sinewy and twisting trunk was her torso, its extreme torsion, her own poignant tension after witnessing the ruins of her material life. Her skin was the furrowed and mossy bark of the tree, her anatomy the double of the tree’s arc, and a window into the depths of the wood. Time has been erased in these images, we cannot refer them to a specific place or to a specific date. The ethereal, tenebrous, light suffused atmosphere of these photographs, whose levels of perception rest one upon the other, and lead ever deeper to the nucleus, is astounding. They lend this work, despite its tragic overtones, an airy and spiritual dimension, a metaphysical lightness that will one day heal all wounds. Iasen’s last journey to Madeira has been a path of progress through suffering and a sobering voyage that will change his work. It is almost, religious. I found, finally, points of connection between the Madeira series and the artist’s early work in the surreal and ludic manner of the image’s composition (which is as well, related to the ethereal qualities just mentioned). This surreal manner pervades the visual and optical complexities of his photography. The fantastic order of the suprareal that was once the subject matter of painting is now a stylistic device that serves the hypereality of tragic icons that narrate deep unity with nature, destruction, grief, and survival. That is Iasen’s quizzical strangeness, his continuous and unfolding contemplation of the world. Jonathan A. P. Allen Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. June 2017

Photography:Black & White on Paper

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:5

Size:23.6 W x 23.6 H x 0.4 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.