The Silence in Ivan Roussev

The wild feeling of a closed space that drags you and in which you fight like an animal, shot me through the unusual route toward the front door, to the left, two steps, to the right, a door, a short but steep spiral staircase, to the left, a door…. air! My heart is racing but I’m saved. Impossible to get back to sleep. How did it affect me…To feel it dragging me in my sleep!

The light slowly prevails over the soaked with moisture dark blue morning air between the hills of Ilindentsi. In the low the moisture has sifted in equal and filled with fog hollows between hills and rubble. Green as I have never seen in this wild area sintered by the summer heat. It is wild in summer. Now it is such a blessing! In May!

Last night I was in the underground corridors Ivan had bored through the hills beneath his house to reach the underground river, filling them with its echoed bubbling. Light is as in a downhole, light for working, under which strange stone forms are shoved around the deaf corridors of the cave.

Ivan experiments with soil, stones and sounds for years – you have surely seen his works in Rayko Alexiev Gallery. And not only there. This work however dragged me within the elements he works with. What I like best is that he has long surpassed any opportunity the suggestion to be kept in a movie or in a picture. Not to mention an exhibition in a gallery. In fact… that work is the gallery.

Stone walls and oblique marble verticals tower above it, among them – in a more acceptable for a gallery exposition form, about a dozen sculptural shapes are arranged, in whose carved from the drill and chisel body Ivan puts candles. In the emerging dusk, their soft yellow light breaks through the rounded by the thick evening darkness stone forms, in a gentle and soft glow. Silence.

The Silence in the World of Ivan Roussev

Sculpture Park Ilindentsi