Portrait of nature, commonly referred to as ‘still life’, has certain double meaning: dead nature, nature morte, or still life. This double meaning poses questions about the essence of nature and art, even if we do not have clear answers. Occasionally considered an old-fashioned genre, the representation of dying nature, it is back in vogue and perfectly embodies the spirit of our times. Still life. Is this still life? In the early Renaissance the artists have depicted nature as a shapeless spiritual entity. Nowadays the scientific strive towards artificial life forms, the computerised virtual reality and the focus on vision instead on content perhaps renders traditional search for truth obsolete. There is no absolute reality anymore but multiple realities, each one as real or as artificial as the other ones. It is possible that the end of modernity coincides not only with the end of nature but also with the end of truth. Slowly and steadily, we replace nature, as currently known to us, with a kind of artificial nature. A new model of reality replaces our traditional perception of laws of nature. For most, a trip through the Disneyland jungle in fact is more real than a real one in the Amazonian rainforest. By common opinion, the artificially coloured and genetically modified strawberries are much more beautiful and tastier than the naturally grown ones.
In memory of Miroslav Ničić
Still 2007, 30x30cm, acrylic on canvas private collection
Still 2007, 30x30cm, acrylic on canvas Blagoevgrad City Art Gallery collection
Still 2007, 30x30cm, acrylic on canvas Art Project Depot collection
Still 2007, 30x30cm, acrylic on canvas private collection
Still 2007, 30x30cm, acrylic on canvas private collection
Live 2007, 90x90cm, acrylic on canvas private collection
Cerberus Whines in Hell 2015, 90x90cm, acrylic on canvas Sofia City Art Gallery Collection, Bulgaria
photo: Kalin Serapionov
Harpalyce Suddenly Got an Appetite Herself 2015, 2 parts painting (main part – 90×90 cm, second part – 30x30cm), acrylic on canvas private collection
photo: Kalin Serapionov
Harpalyce was the daughter of king Clymenus who was overcome with passion for his daughter. In one version he raped her and she became pregnant. When the son was born she served him up as a meal to his father, who killed her over that. In an alternative version, she was instead transformed into a bird. The painting depicts Harpalyce as contemporary woman, who just performed an act of consumption.
The Last Suffer 2017, 180x90cm, acrylic on canvas Sofia City Art Gallery Collection, Bulgaria
photo: Kalin Serapionov
The painting uses the composition of the “The Last Supper” by Leonardo Da Vinci, substituting the male figures with all women personages. At the center is the figure of the artist, who is vomiting as if being discussed and fed up with the whole situation. In the work I use the classical composition, which I consider to be a manifestation of the dominant culture and structure of the world, created and performed by men. By bringing different women figures, among them Lilith, myself, women of different colors, who are individual but also strangely similar to each other, I aim to invalidate and transform the dominant pattern of representation. The “ritual” is just a form, with no visible meaning and visibly absent enthusiasm. The predominant feeling is the one of total boredom and ignorance in front of the pathetic of the actually male narrative.
Covering Your Genitals with Leaves is not Enough 2019, acrylic, canvas,30 х30 сm Sofia City Art Gallery Collection, Bulgaria
photo: Kalin Serapionov
Lilith and Eve Gamble over Adam 2020, acrylic on canvas, 120x120cm private collection
photo: Kalin Serapionov
With the painting Lilith and Eve Gamble over Adam, Iskra Blagoeva continues to develop her series of works Black Paintings of Cheerful Events. All of them are related with the mythological narratives or popular (sacral) images which the artist transforms, always depicting a certain extreme states. Going back to the original biblical story of Adam and Eve, the artist chose to present a situation that is seemingly beyond the Fall. We see a time and a space which is not only far from Eden, but seems to fit in another dimension – a black hole in which the matter gains a different shape and character. The heavenly is cultivated, multiplied, depreciated and finally cold-bloodedly consumed. The opened fast food boxes, the flower in an undersized pot, the ash tray, the perfect donut that rather seems a piece of porcelainware – an artefact that has long lost its function to give pleasure, the wine and the bleached skull make up a still life beyond the natural. In this psychedelic world, the light bulb hanging like gallows replaces the sun; there is neither a way out, nor divine light. The consumed Heaven is the decor of the main act, in which the first human, the man – Adam – is gambled over at cards by the lookalikes Lilith and Eve, in whose form the artist portrays herself. The ultimate state of decadence is reached, which cannot “bear” fruit and “resurrect” the natural. In Iskra Blagoeva’s works, this state of overwhelming finale is a metaphor for the failure of the patriarchal order and the societal conditions and structures created by it, which comprise the foundation of the Western Christian culture. Through the extreme denial – the disgust, cruelty, coldness, and arrogant cynicism towards the sacral, the artist seeks a new image, a new beginning, which puts the woman in another role and gives her the strength to be capable not only of creation, but also of destruction like a vengeful Goddess.
The Sofia Police Department receives a signal that a human arm placed in a yellow plastic “BILLA” bag was found in a trash bin. In another container, а severed male head was also found inside a plastic bag labeled “Europe Shops.” Later, following a signal from a communal building, a human male corpse was found, missing it’s limbs, head and genitals. The police investigation discovered that the murdered K.L. has been missing for several days. He has been living with G.R. and was a step father to A.V. – G.R.’s daughter. When investigating A.B.’s room, the police found a jar with a male penis and testicles in it, filled with red-coloured fluid. A.V. confessed that she has been sexually abused by her stepfather when she was 6 years old. This went on for three years and she did not share it with anybody and that was the motif for the murder. Sometime ago she asked him if he remembered what he had done to her as a child. He told her that he didn’t. And if so, he was forced to do it by the Satan; therefore, he would not apologize. After a while, she invited him to her room and strangled him with a nunchaku and dissected the corpse.
photo: Gergana Mihova
Saint 02 2019, 80×60 cm, acrylic on canvas private collection
For many years M.R. was abused by her son who wos an alcoholic. One day while he was sleeping she killed him with a hoe. She went to prison, but after a year she was released for being seriously ill. She lived with her husband, who was also ill, with whom she had a bad relationship.Later she decided to kill him. She went to his bed and made a small incision in the carotid artery with a butter knife, than locked the door and left him bleeding to death.
With her latest painting, Iskra Blagoeva continues a well-established trend in her work – the artistic and critically motivated reconsideration of myths, symbols and narratives fundamental to human culture and related to the concepts of gender identity and self-perception, the power of representations and resulting stereotypes, as well as the personal act of revolt as a creative stimulus for emancipation.
The artwork is propelled as an experimental reading of the biblical cosmogonic myth about the creation of the world. The first human being, Adam, is transformed into a strange, ambiguous, androgynous creature – with his stolid, passionless, gentle and beautiful face, as if hooded by the impenetrable nimbus of his long black hair, and his whole figure resembling a finely and delicately painted porcelain piece, he emerges as an enigmatic image in which the masculine and the feminine alike challenge the mythological seal of identity. God creates Adam in his own image and likeness, but his creation is presented as initially split in the neutral and empty space of non-coincidence – an iconoclastic as well as a philosophically relevant gesture of revolt against the idea of divine predestination, according to which the pure and perfectly preordained act (actus purus) of God the Creator is absolutely identical to his essence. Introducing difference into the prototype before the appearance of any real distinction, before the appearance of Eve as the other of Adam, is a paradox to the very constitutive gesture of the Creator and a rupture in the foundational myth of creation. This new phantasmal image of the biblical proto-man introduces fluidity between his potential forms, which starkly contradicts the distinctive dissociation from the will of his creator – it expresses the possible rejection of self-definition, that is, of reducing the variety of possibilities to only one clearly delineated role which would inevitably embody the lack of choice and the super-actual power of the prototype. With the imaginary opening of this gap where the supreme archetype dissolves into uncertainty and irreducible difference, Adam is presented in his heterogeneous mode as a queer being: having attained the apple of knowledge before the appearance of Eve, he is the bearer of a different truth – that of non-definition, of the unspecified role, of transidentity, illustrated by a singular and fascinating image of hesitation and melancholic grandeur that both anticipates and exceeds the narrative about the origin of the human race.
With her present artwork, Iskra Blagoeva ironically suggests that the universality of gender identity or any other form of identity determination is not something primordial and does not consist in some natural or transhistorical circumstance – it must be worked out through the knowledge of the multiplicity of the human being, through the difference which initially scatters us among contradictory impulses, states and choices, in other words, through the experience of nonidentity. The image of Adam, who is not image and likeness of his creator, is the image of an alternative – of disobedience and resistance to a predetermined functional order, modelling the world according to some rigid mythological axiom that points to us and declares “you are who you are”.
