Ilia Pashov created art in a “White Room” turned into a sacred cpace

In a world unscarred by the ugliness and shouting of those competing to produce evil, Ilia Pashov created art oozing purity, humility, and the sufficiency of his own soul. Not even a year after his farewell to the earthly realm, his prints and drawings at the Sofia Press gallery-bookstore give us a lesson in humility, so that we may preserve ourselves and, in inner stillness, hear the calling with which we have been sent to this earth for a short while.

“All my life I have longed for a room with white walls, literally. To go into it to draw and nothing more.” With these words, in a letter to his friend Mihail Filipov, the artist shared his dream that the creation of art would remain untainted by the realities beyond the snow-white walls.

“Ilia Pashov truly is a classic outsider, if I may call him that - a person who consciously lived and worked in isolation, but not as an escape, rather as a gesture of self-preservation,” says the curator of the exhibition, Olimpia Daniel. “We see a character who deliberately shaped this attitude toward the world, toward such different and radical art, although he was classically trained. I hope that everyone who visits the exhibition will find evidence in his works - in that elegance, purity, and silence which seem to be the guiding principle of his modus vivendi.”

Olimpia Daniel chose precisely “White Room” as the title of the exhibition as an attempt, in her words, to comprehend the personal refuge of an artist who managed to turn self-isolation into an aesthetic position. But what part of what was born in that intimate space has been transferred onto the white walls of the gallery?

“We very much wanted to come close to his idea of an artistic paradise, to remind people of this desire of his and to realize it,” the art historian replies. “The exhibition includes works from different periods, as well as a small archive in which visitors will see several letters. In them he describes his desire for simplicity, for purity, for a sacred space in which the artist feels well - and that is so understandable in a time when we no longer have silence, calm, a place for reflection, let alone for creativity. Indeed, this white room is something very healing.”

Ilia Pashov was born in 1938 in Gabrovo and in 1968 graduated from the National Academy of Arts with a degree in Illustration. His aesthetic views were influenced by the school of the Italian modernist Giorgio Morandi and his principles of “metaphysical silence,” which he learned about from his professor, Veselin Staykov. At the beginning of his creative career, he worked in scenography and applied graphics, and later in book design and illustration.

After the democratic changes, he held solo exhibitions at Galleri 88 and at Paepkegården, Strömstad, in Sweden. Meanwhile, he specialized in lithography in a workshop with leading instructors from the legendary American Tamarind Institute, refining new techniques in stone processing that allowed for the achievement of airy, transparent layers and an unprecedented purity of detail. “That is where the change seems to have happened and something fundamentally transformed in his outlook. Bulgarian graphic artists are at a very serious level, and to be different among such professionals takes great courage,” adds Olimpia Daniel.

Works by Ilia Pashov are owned by collectors in Italy, France, England, Sweden, the United States, Japan, and other countries.

This modest artist, gifted with finesse and erudition, reveals his inner world not only through images created in a space between the divine and the earthly, but also through words shared with friends, which also remain.

“The most beautiful thing was that I again saw (even in late autumn) the field above which there is a pointed little church - I don’t know if you remember it, between Uddevalla and Tanum, near Dingle - the terrain itself (necessarily sown with golden wheat), the vast blue sky, and the small pointed church between them is something that greatly attracts me and tells me about life on earth. If I had the opportunity, I would live humbly there, in reflection on the life of man,” Ilia Pashov shares in one of his letters, which can be seen in the exhibition’s small archive, provided by friends. In these written words we discern that purified image, freed from everything superfluous, and the striving for simplicity that we also find in his works.

“His letters reveal a longing for ascetic and humble contemplation, and its translation into images proves that there are creators whose presence is not measured by the intensity of their public appearances, but by the depth of their conscious absence from the daily hustle,” says Olimpia Daniel about the life of an artist who lived his allotted time in constant striving toward the divine.

The exhibition dedicated to Ilia Pashov at 29 Slavyanska Street in Sofia can be visited until March 13.

Edited by Elena Karkalanova
English: R. Petkova