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Already in the first decades of the century, Malevich understood that absolute forms and absolute color might not coincide with the final picture. Thus, abstract art not only reaches the limits of rationality, but also strip up the irrational from inside abstraction. Its significance becomes a sort of “sanity carrier” of which the virus of the ego determines the tempo of evolution, schisms, ideological transgressions from the rigors of rationality and constructionism.

With the painting of Angel Patchamanov, we are confronted with an example of how the modality of abstraction is integrated into a significant complex independent from the life of art today. Patchamanov is not dominated by anxiety as are many abstract painters of the new generation, but appears to respond to the fluidity of life’s existence with elasticity. In the fact his canvas offers a world in constant movement and, consequently, changes; where for a time we see evidence of a figurative imagination, in certain cases an anthropomorphism, resting on the prevalence of the related themes of man, from his imagination, his dreams, in sum, to his essence and existence. Dora Vallier has written this proposition: “When in art one raises the question from the subconscious, one thinks of surrealism. Without doubt, because surrealism makes direct reference to the written theories of Freud, although abstract art, initially, seems to turn its back”. (D. Vallier, L’astrattismo, Milano, Garzanti, 1984). Evolving abstract art has already escaped the bounds of the subconscious, lifted its guard without elaboration, in the form of a type of insecurity (Wols) or a incursions to free will (Pollock). However one proposes, Patchamanov is characterized most often as a dynamic centrifuge, where all converges in a unique inside vision (“A canvas is not just a construction of colors and lines, but an animal, a night, a man, or all of these together” affirm the artists of the group Cobra). The art of Patchamanov has a closed rhythm, dominant iridescence, which expresses a vitality which is at it root imaginative, for which man is connected to all things and has a sense of the mysteries of nature. In this view, the accent is on the term “vision”: this mirror of the soul reflects a life indistinguishable from the ends of rationality, but fittingly intermingled with the motives of fantasy. In the most recent paintings, the vivid colors and the brush strokes leave evidence that enlivens the pictorial gesture; an organization to construct a form becomes systems of form, always more definite. It is slow movement into one’s inner self, in a process of reconstruction and assimilation, of bringing things closer together: a disposition of progressive selection like the mouth of a river which filters finally to the sea.

One such formulation completely transposes its proper shape and a massive light diffuses its efficient modulation to a decisive tint. It seems to be untouched by energy emanating from the experience of living, a response to the expression of commotion which results in a singular capacity to express precisely which volume and which image mirror the internal.

NICOLA NUTI, Art Critic, museum Prato
Florence, May '94