With Them

          The paintings of Albena Petkova present an intimate diary of a completely free person, someone who lives in their own personal world. At first glance, the paintings in her exhibition appear as a series of portraits with very simple titles. Various selected images, which the artist found in family photo albums, are used in their creation. 

          Once this is understood, the picture of an interconnected world, a story that encompasses an entire life, gradually unfolds for the patient viewer.

          The artist’s paintings clearly speak of a painfully sensitive observation and vision beyond the visible, revealing unexpectedly deep wisdom and tranquility for the age of 28.

          Today, in our time when the term “traditional family” is politically manipulated, and when the values we live by are in a time of crisis and uncertainty, it is natural for an exhibition to emerge that is not afraid to reject all that is unnecessary—both unreasonable denial and obliging ideology that places life in narrow confines.

          It is particularly wonderful that such a view of the personal world can be shown in a house built by Kolyo Ficheto, a renowned figure in Bulgarian architecture. Sometimes it is possible to forget the home even while living in it. Life itself can impose other priorities, different dynamics, and a different language of thoughts, which can be infinitely distant from the harmony of a Bulgarian house, founded on eternal aesthetics. What remains for us in this confused world? The subconscious, which merges these words: “home” and “family.”

          Albena Petkova’s exhibition shares its freedom beyond definitions. In her paintings, the past does not need to be locked away; nor does it need to dominate life today or tomorrow. The home remains a home, where the best is always yet to come.

          Serafim Devolsky

            London-Kostur-Dryanovo ’24.