A confession extracted from the depths of the soul. A parallel world, states, unspoken words, forgotten destinies, striving for something higher, achieving unity, silence, immaterial substance, irretrievability, life... with a creeping sense of one’s own transience are carried by Rosen Donchev's paintings as a message.

Rosen Donchev's painting sculpts intimate spaces of colors, visions, shadows and memories from the past, while at the same time calling for a rational interpretation that transcends this very materiality. We use all possible knowledge and experience to overcome the substantiality in search of deep and comprehensive meanings. The condensed spatial monolithicity and exceptional multilayered tissue born of the uneven rhythm of color accumulations, scratches and thinning of the surface in them concentrates the emotional power of the author’s impulse guided simultaneously by intuitive insight and contemplative wisdom.

Rosen Donchev / Another Universe

These over 20 canvases from the Warm Gray series, lyrical and carrying peaceful messages, created over the last three years testify to the artist’s path leading to liberation from nature and expanse of his imagination. Sometimes it appears to us that we can distinguish individual symbols and elements, which, however, seem to lose their outlines preserving the sense of spiritual archetypes, of something eternal and lasting.

His art is a striving to achieve a purely artistic reality that is independent and harmonious. There are no contrasts here; on the contrary, the painter builds subtle tones within a narrow color range. He uses various substances as if in some ritual intoxication, like a medieval alchemist – pigments, emulsions, binders and gives material value to his spontaneous sense of the suggestive possibilities of color expressed in a unique amalgam of gray-ochre-red tonality and delicate ultramarine.

Rosen Donchev combines visual signs creating poetic spaces bordering on abstraction. The combinations of lines, objects, shapes, alternating and intersecting implicit silhouettes, domes, portals, angels, devoid of detail, have an aesthetic and philosophical effect. We can see in the layers of superimpositions, creating visual structures that endlessly generate one another, enigmatic images of ancient cities, temples, gloomy terrains and skies, landscapes filled with tension, but also with a sense of harmony and peace. The tonally and texturally diverse dynamic compositions depict unreal worlds and their plastic values are characterized by figural clarity and simplicity. Having surrendered himself to the autonomous logic of painting, Rosen Donchev achieves a saturation of a dramatic and expressive effect through stylization of imagery and explicit light-shadow contrasts. The symbolism, metaphors, allusions or direct plastic suggestions have their own independent life in the compositional fields; they do not call for empathy in the conventional meaning of the word. Rosen Donchev leaves it up to everyone to understand how they function and if we wish... to remain in the world of abstraction, in the play of textures, tones, halftones and fields of imagination.

Natasha Noeva, curator

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WARM GRAY and the thoughts that excited and inspired us. About painting and the territories between black and white. About a drawing, which is imperfect and unfinished. About metaphors and signs. About handwritten words as part of an image. About the natural power of mineral pigments and binders. And only sometimes, when a dream has not gone away and a day is still a warm gray premonition, the boundaries between things fade and finally disappear altogether... Then people seem to understand the meaning of their existence. Some of them even see the threads that connect all living beings and inexplicable phenomena into a single whole. Another time silhouettes of angels and Virgin Maries, footsteps of birds, people and all kinds of other flying creatures suddenly appear in broad daylight, in the haze of warm gray... When a person looks at them, they begin to look like they were painted. When I look at them, I often wonder if someone has made a heavenly collage of summer, burgundy memories, yellow quinces and a blue fox. I even think this someone is the same one who pours a huge basket of stars on us every night. The stars that twinkle mysteriously in the horizontal world of warm gray...

Rosen Donchev, May 2025

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About the author

Rosen Donchev was born in 1963 in Gabrovo. He is a graduate of the National High School of Applied Arts in Tryavna majoring in Interior Architecture (1982) and St. Kliment Ohridski Sofia University majoring in Bulgarian Philology (1990). He is a Painting graduate of Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen in the class of Prof. Dimitar Cholakov (2013).
He has over 20 solo exhibitions, has participated in international painting plein airs, in national and regional exhibitions and reputable painting forums such as Friends of the Sea, Burgas; Ludogorie National Exhibition, Razgrad; Biennial of Small Forms, Pleven, etc. He has won awards at the Myths and Legends of My People Quadrennial, Stara Zagora and is a two-time winner of Hristo Tsokev Award for overall performance at the annual exhibition of Gabrovo artists. Paintings and icons by Rosen Donchev are part of private and public collections in Europe, Russia, the United States, South Africa and Australia, including the Japanese imperial family and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Izmit, Turkey.
In 2010 the artist Vanya Zapryanova and he created together the Atelieto Gallery in Kazanlak.
A member of the Union of Bulgarian Artists.
President of the Union of Bulgarian Artists’ Representative Office in Kazanlak.
A master icon painter at the National Chamber of Crafts in Bulgaria.
Lives and works in Kazanlak.