THE CARRIER by Pavel Koychev

For second time the famous Bulgarian sculptor presents a brand new project of his in the hall of EIBANK Gallery.

Inspired by Valeri Stefanov’s novel “The Lost Donkeys” Pavel Koychev has worked on “The Carrier” a whole year.

Actually the book is only a ground for the author to take up a theme that he is long interested in. As he himself defines, his project is an attempt to create something like “panegyric of the donkey”. Here the donkey is the one of Jesus – the Carrier of Saviour, whose fate is unknown after the outcome of the Biblical story.

Now there are four donkeys in the hall like the number of the versions given by the four evangelists with regard to what happens to the Carrier after Jesus alights from it in front of the temple.

Pavel Koychev’s idea keeps a deep philosophical lesson for our modern times and how the world can be changed by more making and less consuming. The image of the donkey – carrier in some way visualizes another idea, and namely that the benefit of a certain thing and the contribution to a certain cause are always more important than the dissipation.

Pavel Koychev’s donkeys are also a plastic study of the form and the borderline between the literal recreation and the full and transcendental (in this case) abstraction.

Again the sculptor provokes the standard perceptions by several different interpretations of one and the same image. The donkey is woven of treads or sticks, cast of bronze, moulded of clay, passed as a form through all variations of the material – that one which you can place quite tangibly in the space. In contrast to the donkey the figure of the man that is carried, the one of the Messiah, is a much more a light, a vague abstraction and something difficult to be caught by the senses.

As in all project of Pavel Koychev the challenge is based on several levels.