Petra Dimitrova

Probably each of us has at some point been curious to peek into the contents of a container or a public trash can, just as we might glance at the food on a neighboring table in a restaurant or on a neighbor’s balcony. People throw away all sorts of things, and that is why trash is a material reflection of our society, of the way we live and consume. If someone decides to explore our civilization, they would certainly turn their gaze to the trash. Petra also takes on the role of such a detective-archaeologist. Her paintings are reminiscent of the classic exercise of drawing arbitrary, abstract volumes, such as those of crumpled paper or Leonardo’s attempts to graphically depict clouds. In this case, this precise outline of the chaos we find ourselves in delicately criticizes it, through the irony of its own aestheticization. In this artistic language, trash appears as a shapeless, amorphous mass, a volume of superfluous and impersonal matter that has lost its meaning. Let us just think about how valuable a pair of scissors, a saucepan, a radio, or a pair of jeans was considered in the past, in contrast to today.

Alexander Gabrovsky

The presence of animals in the composition is surreal. The horses step confusedly in the middle of the inter-block landscape and their clatter echoes the Fauvism of Franz Marc’s blue horses. A volume of Baudelaire rolls between their hooves, whose inspiring power the author has not forgotten to honor. Perhaps it is the rebellious spirit of symbolism that has made one of these same horses turn with its teeth towards us – the viewer, watching from the comfort of the white cube, and break its fourth wall. In the confused gazes of the animals, seeking sustenance in the remains of our life, we discover the same insatiable hunger and feeling of loss that we experience in the world that we ourselves have created for ourselves. The only exception is that the animals are the innocent victims – those who adapt to the environment that we have taken from them and egocentrically adapted to ourselves. We are the ones who forced them to transform from hunters and herbivores into junk collectors. The technique of oil monotype further adds to the idea of ​​the imprint of human activity on the face of nature.