Critics Guide to the Plays of Time and Gravitation Critics Guide to the Plays of Time and Gravitation Thousands of years ago Time had its beginning. Then space was gathered up within a single point.
Thousands of years ago when everything we know now (as well as the things that mind and imagination have no power to grasp) was pressed in a monstrous ancient Prime Egg. Somewhere there, when there had not been “there” yet (which could have been everywhere), the whole CONTENT of the world burst out of a single point and for a few moments it existed only in the form of light. The so called Big Bang. And just seconds after it when there had been nothing else except rays of light, the wandering power gave birth to the living matter with all its transformations and forms. Astronomers estimate that this event occurred about 11-12,000,000,000 years ago! However, I am sure that Angel Patchamanov have been there. Only a man who knows for certain all the whims of light and its old fears not to get lost in emptiness can depict it in such a courageous, provocative, and at the same time friendly way.
Nothing else could have taught Angel Patchamanov that the four dimensions are not only categories, but also playful flowers. He collects them in a plane with no objections; rearranges them so that they remain tender, then he puts colors to make them shine. He disposes figures in an unique manner and jests together with them with gravitation. Brush spreads out horizons against which sparkling shadows of things we do not see, but only feel, swing. Within the frame we find our look towards the fields of space (which turns out warm). Space which we just enter, and not the scientists’ one where we are surely going to get lost.
Patchamanov has run for at least hundreds of light years in the mixer of haziness and remembered how the first beams of creation swung as triangles and rhombs before they chose the more languid curves of spheres and spirals with which they lay down in eternity. That is why those “memories” of his, put into a mount or wooden profile, now seem both extraordinarily intermingled and close to us. We have already been in some of these forms and we still remember it in the back of our minds. They are odd and ours. They draw us towards the unnatural, but we do not lose balance. We just regain it.
In front of the canvasses of Angel one can understand the wisdom of the genius mathematician Louis Carol who wishing to reveal the beauty of his mathematical discoveries wrote “Alice in the Wonderworld”. This innocent at first glance little book now catches in surprise the physicists who read it - how Carol succeeded to code his insight of the structure of the Universe in ostensibly impossible stories. What men who has grown up after Einstein is to find between the lines peeking over their children’s shoulders.
In the vegetal/plant/vegetative and geometric themes of these paintings of Patchamanov, the tom-cat who gradually disappears leaving only his smile behind would feel in place. Looking at the air balance and the combinations, you discover the poetry of space where Dali himself would run after the little girl in the combats against the mirrors and would hardly think of the time which flows over the trees.
Behind the soaring volume, harmonious lines and half-kaleidoscopic numbers Angel has piled up in layers the wisdom of memories that will come true and future happenings that we have missed or forgotten. When you understand why the combinations are so unostentatious, the perspective - not overloaded, and Things are both weightless and tangible, then you come back again to look at the canvasses which as if you understood some time ago. And even in the water-lillies you see heralds who communicate the mortality of the bottom with the reality of the existing - the water, and the imperceptible for the frog - the Space. You do not see the root but you feel it, you look at the leaves you touched but this time you find them as green satellite discs which send the secrets of the lake to another world in another galaxy - where triangles act in photosynthesis. And time and gravitation are children chasing each other like butterflies.
Nikolay Ilchevski, journalist
Plovdiv, May '01