Nikolai Russev

paints - as he defines himself - naive realism. It could be a realistic naivism but this is only a game of words. Other is talented interpretation of an author's understanding of life and world. Other is a colourful freeway of a pictorial world where man and beast, myth and truth, sky and earth, woman and man meet in visual metamorphosis, where icon faces peek and watch the small human passions and perhaps enjoy secretly the naked beauties who inhabit magnificently and permanently the space under the sky.

The artist has the ability to paint adequately one by the other the face of a certain holy man near the calm muzzle of an inspired animal. Country life is at the center of many paintings with the strongest and best it can offer - the fruitfulness, the blessed hard work, patriarchy of the family, the playful but still virtuous beauty of the woman and the colorful radiance of our nature. The paintings of Nikolai Rusev are like a sequence of magic sessions that makes the illusion more real, the soul - more colourful and the world - more human. K.A.