Introduction
Trying to provide overall protection of naïve and marginal art as a specific segment of contemporary art, demonstrating its essence, real values, high artistic achievements and truly creative energy, Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art in Jagodina, within its exhibiting and publishing activity, pays special attention to recognition of significant artists whose research contributes to understanding of complex organism of both domestic and foreign naïve and marginal art. Among those who bring freshness of new experience, young artists like Rosen Rashev from Bulgaria are especially distinguished. Insufficiently known and studied, naïve and marginal art in Bulgaria has long been suppressed by ideological influences of totalitarian society and lack of creative freedom. The interest in naïve and marginal art in Bulgaria has increased for last few decades, and quite specific creativeness of Rosen Rashev is an important catalyst of the process of affirmation.
Rosen Rashev was born in the town of Vratza (Bulgaria) in 1970. He spent the earliest period of his life at his grandmother’s in the village of Donja Beshovica, where precious tradition of native land such as weaving on a frame, folk tales, customs and intertwined Christian and pagan beliefs were to be permanently remembered, leaving long lasting traces in further oeuvre of the artists.
His infantine interest in artistic expression achieved more clear contours with time. While still at primary school, Rosen’s talent was noticed by Evgenij Todorov, a pedagogue from Vratza, who later significantly encouraged him to paint. In 1985, when he enrolled at Secondary Art School in Sofia, Rosen had already formed his original artistic expression. In spite of his teachers’ comments that he “should first learn how to paint and then do those naïve and primitive paintings,” the impulse for creation of the art that lay in his heart and soul, free and unburdened with the canons of artistic tradition prevailed after his graduation in 1989. Being confident with his decision, Rashev did not enroll at Academy of Art and dedicated himself to unrestrained creative work. The appropriateness of this decision was confirmed by Rosen’s oeuvre, characterized by authentic and powerful expression, originating from continuous and instinctive creative process. Although he occasionally spent some time in Sofia arranging with galleries and collectors, Rosen’s life and artistic cycle, completely dedicated to art, was developing around Vratza and the village of Donja Beshovica. Unique, magnificent, yet mild countryside of the artist’s native land inspired and challenged him.
Rosen Rashev has been exhibiting since 1986, and a considerable number of independent and group exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad and numerous awards and recognitions follow his abundant artistic oeuvre. His works have been exhibited at many galleries and museums such as Town Art Gallery Ivan Funev, Vratza, Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art, Jagodina, Serbia, MNMA Salon, Belgrade, Slovenska National Gallery, Bratislava (Slovakia), and are found in many private collections in Bulgaria, Serbia, Germany, Switzerland, France,. Israel, USA, Italy, Japan, Belgium and Greece. The greatest number of his works, around seventy, is in the collection of Hugo Vuten, a significant collector of Bulgarian art from Belgium. Forty-four works by Rashen, done in the period 1993-2000 are in the collection of Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art in Jagodina.
Although Rosen Rashev’s oeuvre is large, exhibited at numerous independent and group exhibitions and welcomed by the audience and art collectors, it is still insufficiently known and clarified. Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art in Jagodina has paid considerable attention to authentic artistic values of his pictorial language. Thanks to Kostadin Bonev, a Bulgarian film director, the Museum entered into contact with a young Bulgarian artist and invited him to take part in the Sixth Art Colony. Since then (1994), Rosen has been a prominent participant of international events, Biennials and colonies organized by the Museum, as well as of permanent exhibition at the Museum in Jagodina and since 2006, he has been at permanent exhibition of Museum Salon in Belgrade. In 1995, at the Seventh Biennial of Naïve Art, Rashev was awarded Special Recognition for the Exhibited works and in 2003, the jury of the Eleventh Biennial awarded him Grand Prix for the exhibited works. After his first independent exhibition at Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art in 1999, his creativity intensively developed towards new, inventive research of own authentic pictorial expression, which made it necessary for this specific artistic personality to be presented again.

Creative oeuvre
For more than two decades of artistic work, young artist Rosen Rashev realized impressive oeuvre in number and complexity, authenticity and variety of expression, techniques, materials, and subject matters. Complex and specific structure of his works imposes a demanding explanation, avoiding definitions and classification into rigid boundaries of terminological qualifiers. This unusual union of the archaic and the modern, a deep instinctive connection to vital spiritual heritage of the Balkans and strong instinctively creative impulse, lasting aspiration towards artistic freedom and total spontaneity and directness of artistic procedure generated the world of authentic regulations unrestricted by academic canons, which exists where naïve and marginal art meet and intertwine. In infantile, autistic way, Rosen Rashev deeply experiences art as an existential impulse that minimizes the proscribed cultural and artistic tendencies. Creating his own non-conventional esthetics, he comes closer to marginal artists. Like them, Rashev does not fit into the uniformity of behaviour, education, life, and view of the world; yet, creating the world of own authentic artistic rules, he does not definitely lose touch with the outer world. Today, at the age of developed communications and easily available information, artistic isolation is practically impossible. It mostly exists as the artist’s decision to keep devoted to his own world of ideas. As an intuitive act, the creative process results from the artist’s authentic spirit, being influenced by all his experiences, consciously or unconsciously remembered. Yet, wealth of observations is only a raw material upon which the artist’s vision can rely in the moment of instinctive revelation.



Techniques and materials
Powerful instinctive impulse for creation and a pronounced aspiration towards artistic freedom encourage Rosen Rashev to tirelessly explore a wide range of different possibilities of two-dimensional and three-dimensional expression. Different techniques and materials such as drawing in pencil, coal, felt pen through pastel, aquarelle, gouache, oil, and acrylic on canvas, cardboard, wood, hardboard, sculpturing in clay, stone and wood proved to be limited for rich fancy and creative curiosity of this artist. He is especially inspired with combining different techniques and fanciful application of non-painting materials. He uses various kinds of paper, fabric, wood, metal, clay, hand-made rustic paper, thread, rope as well as everyday objects, pieces of hand-woven blankets or furniture, buttons, nails… The artist uses the material that ‘speaks’, while the choice shows his emotional attitude, open and mighty experience.
All those materials serve as a weft, which Rashev incorporates into his works using different procedures like drawing, scratching, gluing, sewing, embroidering, hammering, pyrography, inventively combining techniques to produce a significant third dimension. Even in his earliest attempts, Rashev experimented with his own techniques; he would pour alcohol or spray deodorant over the drawings in biro and ballpoint pen to achieve the effect of aquarelle-like diffusion, or catch sunrays with magnifying glass and burn the wood to incise different motifs. In addition to specific three-dimensional paintings, Rosen’s inclination towards voluminous forms is also found in full plastics, from small-sized engraved plastic in terracotta to larger figures done in various materials, fabric, sacks, which he sews, glues, fills with straw or some other non-sculpture material.

Subject matter
In addition to the choice of techniques, materials and artistic procedures, Rosen Rashev’s originality, inventiveness, and creative curiosity is highly pronounced when subject matter is concerned. Rosen’s fascinating and authentic subject matters depict a unique, mostly imaginary universe. Although its roots originate from the experienced reality, traditional, religious or natural contents, the artist dyes and unites them with authentic seal of genuine invention employing instinctive search for individual truths, primeval, old, and unconscious strata. Two-dimensional, imaginary landscape in Rosen’s paintings is inhabited with imaginary people, anthropomorphous figures, celestial and heavenly creatures, angels, cherubs, aliens, pagan creatures, then animals, real and imaginary fish, birds, snakes, goats, phantasmagoric figures, winged horses, unicorns, unusual metamorphoses… Rashev makes own vocabulary of the wondrous, the world of fancy, tranquility, and joy, where his benevolence even to the “wildest” creatures of his fantasy is felt.
Directly and truly, Rosen Rashev transmits his experience and emotion, his attitude to the existential issues, life and death, good and evil, birth, growth, reproduction and death. This world is full of open curiosity about life in all its forms, which the artist approaches without a taboo. Hence several thematic wholes that show stages through which the artist passes, ascending the helical line from the earthly, materialistic to high, spiritual spheres.
A group of early works reflects the artist’s preoccupation with elementary primordial instincts, obsessions, erotic passions, instincts, doubts, and fears. This theme was shaped in the form of dramatic compositions of nudes and animal figures with pronounced sexual characteristics. Those are inventive, authentic works, liberated from any conventions (My Dream, Self-Portrait, The Keeper of Goodness). Obsession with ancient, pagan motifs and precipitated archaic experience are found in the paintings Kurenti and Happiness with Unicorn.
Then the phase of rerouted instinct follows, when the artist is obsessed with higher instinct of a social being, family as a source of potency, comfort, and inspiration, fascination with the birth of a new life. These paintings radiate with special immediacy, sincerity, beauty, and emotional harmony.
A great number of Rosen’s works is to some extent marked with religious contemplations. Whether with Biblical motifs (Adam and Eve, Birth of Christ) or authentic formulations of the artist’s intimate understanding of religiousness and relationship to God (A Man before God, The Angel of Destiny), the works are characterized by specific and childishly pure experience. Their distinctively contemplative character is emphasized by ultimate stylization and reduction of artistic elements. Religious, Christian motifs, as well as profane are often intertwined into unusual combination of stylized traditional motifs and associations of pagan customs producing a fanciful vision that assimilates the character of the universal. Rashev does not experience faith, tradition, and folklore as a limiting factor, but as a live organism, which is transformed and changed by personal experience and affinity. Guided by artistic instinct, the artist manages to unite his outer experience of the realistic world with the inner vision, transposing it into visibly expressed artistic truth that illuminates the essence of reality. In this way, he raises the sensuously and personally experienced to the level of imaginary, general and eternal.

Artistic expression
Exploring inaccessible areas of his soul, his emotional, speculative and spiritual universe, trying to accomplish the contact with own self and surrounding world, Rosen Rashev creates personal repertoire of motifs and signs, as a specific artistic expression by which he denies narration, thus being completely concentrated on pictorial values of artistic work. Powerful instinct of creative impulse, aspiration towards artistic freedom and total unrestrained spontaneity and directness in artistic procedure create the world of authentic regulations, unrestricted by academic canons. Rashev’s rich oeuvre includes diversity of assortment and combinations of various techniques, materials, and procedures in shaping two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, and minimization of artistic elements that form harmonic and impressive whole.
In addition to subject matter, which reflects the artist’s preoccupation with primary impulses, instincts, obsessions, erotic passions, the paintings of his earliest period, done mostly in oil on canvas and hardboard are specific for their artistic language. Dramatics of these motifs is expressed in two-dimensional compositions filled with dynamic, rhythmic intertwining of powerfully stylized human, animal, and phantasmagoric figures whose plain surfaces were animated by pronouncedly contrasting, dark, or bright drawing and sound nuances of intensive colours.
Rashev is interested in making regulations on own artistic speech, increasingly pronounced abstraction and reduction of artistic elements and profound, synthesized experience of an artistic work as autonomous reality. Exploring the ways to express own ideas and experiences most directly, using stylization and reduction, the artist rejects minor visual elements and emphasizes those fundamental in presentation that function within powerful unity of the composition, while, at the same time, he daringly utilizes various techniques, non-painting materials and procedures.
Reducing the composition to basic, essential elements of the presented idea, he accomplishes intensiveness in the simplicity. Plain, abstracted, non-perspective, non-materialized, potentially endless space dominates over harmonious, balanced, often symmetric compositions, emphasizing ultimately stylized, condensed, often slightly indicated shapes reduced to the mere idea of form. Their generalization creates specific effect of non-conventional esthetics, grotesque, thus coming closer to the experiences of art brut i.e. outsider art. Consequently simplified to the level of a symbol, a sign and an emblem and uniquely animated with the author’ authenticity, his figures have a certain monumentality and stability, hypnotic frontal position, thus acting with metaphysics of their simplified forms. Their expressiveness is achieved by clear and pronounced simplicity of the drawing.

Drawing
In Rosen Rashev’s oeuvre, drawing is very significant and present in all its forms, either as one of vital artistic elements or as an independent artistic form (Basically, It Ends Where It Begins, The Circle of My Life). Stylized, synthesized, and ultimately reduced yet unerring, precise, and convincing drawing animates superficially, emblem-like treated forms, thus intensifying the effect of powerful inner unity of the whole. Ornamental reduction, fancy, and expressiveness associate to charming simplicity of a child’s drawing or prehistoric cave scenes. In addition to drawing in pencil, felt pen, pastel, scratching, pyrography, the artist also uses the technique of hand stitching, sewing, embroidery with thread or rope to achieve specific graphic effect by which the drawing gains a kind of softness, expressiveness and new quality of rustic texture. The hand stitching technique is traditional by origin, but the artist transforms it into an individualized artistic element. Liberated from utilitarianism and decorativeness and balanced with other elements, its function is to achieve harmonious whole and transmit the artist’s visions. In addition to the function of drawing and embedding of applications, by using the technique of sewing, Rashev animates certain surfaces in the painting by filling them with crossed lines of the stitch, thread; this gives a specific quality of soft, gentle, transient structure to the painting, changing its colouring. The artist’s non-conventional approach to the painting as an independent and authentic reality is also found in the way by which he incorporates the signature, year of creation and numerous textual segments into the body of the painting. The signature and segments of textual portions become artistic symbols, which sometimes extend through the whole composition, and in addition to their specific graphic and calligraphic quality achieve esthetic function and become the integral part of the painting.

Colour
In addition to the primary importance of drawing, colour is also one of basic pictorial elements in Rosen Rashev’s works. Abstracted, it is not functionally subordinated to volume and extension, but often has merely pictorial character, an esthetic role in achieving rhythmic organization and organic balance of the composition. It has an intuitive, symbolic dimension of transmitting contemplative and emotional contents. This artistic element is also subordinated to the author’s imagination and inner feeling of artistic truth by reducing the range from nearly monochrome, sometimes transient, tonally shaded nuances to expressive powerful, contrasting relationships of a few intensive, often pure tones of complementary colours.

Texture
The greatest number of Rosen’s paintings is characterized by the pronounced quality of texture. The surfaces of certain thick, paste-like mass of intensive colour bordered with thread, the compact structures with visible brush strokes become the sole matter of the painting thus achieving a new dimension, complementary to the applications in the painting. Such rustic parts of coloured surfaces show a certain quality of texture intensity, which, in Rashev’s paintings, ranges from smooth, equally treated surfaces to those with different kinds of applications by which the painting enters the third dimension, becoming the object itself. Within the autonomous area of the painting, subordinated exclusively to the artist’s imagination, laminar and voluminous structures and the principle of collage and combining of text and shape interchange.
A group of paintings done in the last few years is characterized by quite different artistic experience. The mere name given to this entity, Blue Heavens, shows the tendency toward spiritualization, which is especially pronounced in both thematic sense and domain of reduced pictorial expression. Particular Biblical motifs and authentic formulations of the artist’s intimate concept of the spiritual, religiousness and relationship toward God are marked with direct, authentic, yet childishly pure experience. Their contemplative character is emphasized by ultimate stylization and reduction of pictorial elements and specifically treated technique of oil on canvas. Intensively diluted oil colours nearly achieve transparent, airy effect of aquarelle. Simple, harmonious composition consists of reduced forms framed with clear, bright, and persuasive drawing in pencil, and ultimately reduced pastel colouring of powerful and symbolic force.

Volume
Exploring the limits of the mode to emphasize spiritual, instinctive dimension of his artistic universe employing reduced expression, Rashev creates a group of paintings, which, with applied patches of fabric, frequently filled with other material gain a significant, third dimension, becoming thus specific paintings-objects. This pronounced voluminous capacity is balanced and softened by utilization of maximum formal and colour reduction. Potently reduced, synthesized forms in natural, refined colouring of nearly monochrome surface of the painting are pronounced only with their volume or stitched drawing, creating a harmoniously balanced whole.

Sculpture
The artist’s aspiration to step out of the boundaries of the two-dimensional and explore the possibilities of artistic expression in full three-dimensional plastic is apparent. Hence sculptural expression makes an important part of his oeuvre, from small sized engraved plastic in terracotta (clay small-sized figures) to big-sized sculptures (wood and rope) and reduced forms of sculptures made of fabric or sacks that he sews, glues, fills with straw or some non-typical sculpture material. Ceramic figures in natural colour of non-glazed clay are especially impressive in their refined simplicity and expressiveness of the idea. Simple, stylized forms of human, animal, or phantasmagoric figures expressed in sculptures or engraved drawings with intertwined motifs, associate to ancient, prehistoric formulae and, despite small dimensions, give the impression of monumentality. Pure ceramic mass, where no instruments for shaping are used, glaze coverings or colouring make the material intimate and pliable for the artist’s manual game. Not anticipating what he is going to shape, Rashev gives a form to his beautiful and gentle spiritual world. Synchronically enriched with Christian humility, pantheistic temper, Biblical metaphors, they are free to become totems and idols of quite an individual, intimate world. Rashev leaves these figures somewhat rustic, slightly unfinished, giving impression that the process of shaping has not been completed yet and that immediate transformation into some different shape is possible; hence, the oeuvre of this artist, viewed as a whole, leaves the impression of continuous, instinctive creative process.

Symbolism
Rosen Rashev’s artistic world directly transmits his genuine, touching, personal truths, using reduced, synthesized artistic wholes of great expressiveness. With his works, he communicates with his both inner and outer world. The artist explores his intimate issues in reality, memories, dreams, and primeval depths of accumulated, archaic experience and, transforming them with his powerful imagination and condensed artistic elements, builds expressive, authentic symbolism. Rosen’s sophisticated imagination finds symbolic meanings in non-materialistic radiation of certain colours, nobleness, and spiritual dimension of certain materials.
Some of those objects, like hand-woven blankets, previously used in a church in Sofia, with their warmth of hand making and precipitated concentration of spiritual energy of decade-long praying are utilized only in his special works where certain sacral symbolism is emphasized. Thus, he uses pieces of old military frock coat to introduce the figures of mother and wife, symbolizing their concern and devotion, while at the same time presenting himself with a new, clean linen fabric, thus showing his wish to preserve his soul pure and innocent.
The artist sees spiritual, symbolic dimension even in the technique of stitching and sewing, because he can stitch the light emerging from the heart of the sewer, insomuch the thread of divine meditation stitches our destinies.
The choice of colours in Rosen’s works is also often in the function of certain symbolism. White, ochre and blue dominate. Blue as a colour predominates in Rosen’s reality, both earthly and spiritual, in his surroundings where cerulean nuance of Vratza mountain Balkan merges with transparent blue of the sky, while the sky is the symbol of aspiring towards the spiritual, higher spheres. He symbolizes the earth on which we walk using golden ochre. He uses white as the colour of heavenly realm to paint human faces, because every being has a portion of white inside, as joy, love, peace, and tranquility.
Each shape in Rosen’s works, reduced to the idea of form, becomes a symbol, which, even when including layers of ancient, archaic, or Christian symbolism, is always sealed with the artist’s unique imagination. In Rosen Rashev’s oeuvre rich with multitude of symbols, the symbols of an angel, a fish and a ship take a prominent place.
For Rashev, the figures of angels, transformed in various fanciful shapes are not transient, invisible creatures. They are realistic, always present companions with whom he freely communicates; they fatherly protect him, counsel, and calm.
The well-known symbol of God’s emanation, like the souls of believers, the motif of a fish has the meaning of allegory of higher mind, spiritual spheres, but also the fulfillment of human spiritual and creative act as heavenly essence of human genius.
A ship, also frequent motif in Rashev’s works has essential symbolism of Noah’s ark, which takes the passengers over a rough sea of life and tempests of passions to the harbour of salvation.
These symbols connect a complex symbolism of ascending spiral of Rosen’s creative pathway, following the traces of the inner and outer universe, from earthly, materialistic, to higher, spiritual spheres. In all these, Rosen finds positive energy that is interwoven through whole Rosen’s oeuvre.

Sunny side of the soul
Rosen Rashev creates his magic world of fantasy, tranquility, and light that transmits the artist’s joy of creation. “I want to show that my soul is sunny inside! I am trying to transmit the surrounding positive energy into my works.” For Rosen, art is an instinctive, existential necessity. Non-conventional nature of this artist, which aspires towards the unlimited freedom in the world of necessary conventions, finds its expression while creating authentic, imaginary world of art, world of complete spiritual freedom. The author himself bears witness: I paint every single day. Art helps both the people and the artist. Through it, the author becomes more balanced, tranquil; it balances human spirituality.
Creative world of Rosen Rashev, genuine, personal and fanciful, potent with authentic expression, makes us search for the depths of own inner universe, finding and preserving enough freedom, directness and children-like innocence to allow the art to touch us; it hypnotically provokes us to become spiritual companions of Rosen Rashev on Noah’s ark, in search for own salvation, for the sunny side of own souls.

Ivana Jovanović