The Balloon Catcher

THE BALLOON CATCHER features works created by Boyan during the two years
that preceded the show at RawArt Gallery, which he had spent in his homeland of
Bulgaria.
The exhibition was in fact a painting installation, created specifically for the
gallery’s space. It included around 50 oil-on-wood paintings of different sizes,
featuring characters that Boyan has painted repeatedly over the years. These
include the pirate, the clown, the magician, the freak, and horse riders
from different eras and contexts — knights, cowboys, and Napoleons. These male heroic figures have become embedded in our cultural memory in early
childhood. In Boyan’s paintings, these characters look like dressed-up visitors,
while his painterly work virtuously skips from one European genre to another.
Europe, the historical-geopolitical realm ruled by the Western Christian Church,
is present in these paintings not only as a biographical or art-historical background but also as the motherland of the early children’s tales — the ones that came from deep in the forest, that haven’t yet been watered down by Disney or by our contemporary society’s political correctness. Boyan depicts these legendary figures through their dark, perverse, tragic-comic, sarcastic, European side, emphasizing their relevance to our contemporary world through painterly means and installation.