Trips: Drawings by Kiril Gegoski
THE LANDSCAPE OF KIRIL GEGOSKI
The concept of this text was based upon the intention to document those achievements of Kiril Gegoski which by their typological characteristics cover the thematic movements of the 1980s and of those touching the years of the new millennium. In the mentioned creative-temporal intervals, the challenging drive of the analysis was aimed towards reviewingthe conquering of an open, wide spectrum of his opus.
In the 1970s he offered a variant of a minimalistic organization of the painting where the system of the formal structure directly implied the possibilities to also include a photographic projection, while in the 2000 he already felt the spirit of the German expressionism, using the poetic of a released stroke, thus achieving the deformations of a mimetic iconic form – the landscape.
The glow of Gegoski`s works acquires intensity if we consider the fact that he was, after all, one of the actors who participated in the new cultural milieu which occurred in relation to the meaning of the painting medium of the 1970s. He arouse as an artist sincerely dedicated to the style and the spirit of the time, since he knew how to follow the trends. The “radical” shift that Gegoski made by the end of that decade, which is the basic objectives of my review, was meant to define new formulas of transposing the rational realism, adopted in altered frames. He found the acquiring of the “new painting rules” as a kind of an unburdened check of the role of the paint in space, which was primarily meant to render the effect of the fine, almost fluid, watercolor-like, transparent lyrical landscapes. He achieved excellence with almost every work that belongs to the cycle Landscapes, made in 1978 and 1979 (and few at the beginning of the 1980s), where the reductive principle of the landscape was mostly based upon the color associations, with an emphasis on a single structural fragment.
By the year 2000 his two decade long and seemingly lethargic attitude towards the landscape changed and oriented towards an altered schematics, with a more pronounced expression. Here the simple composition rendered the effects where the color immanency (with an emphasized intensity) definitely shapes the experience of the abstract associative entities.
The creative development of Gegoski during his four decade long commitment was under the sign of a sincere obsession with the imperatives to revive the landscape of the Prilep surrounding and include there in the complexity of the permanent alteration of the motif. His commitment to the landscape showed that it is something much higher than a simple genre testing and that it offers endless interpretations and creative possibilities which also include a certain measure of generalization. Considering the essential facts and several steadily fixed ranges of color which were avoided his former phases, the painting suggests the contours of mountains or trees, which is the artist`s specific way of evoking nature.
Detailed thoughts are noted in the exhibited drawings (acrylic on paper, 29,7×21) which are part of the cycle Voyages, created many years before.
Marika Bochvarova Plavevska
