Art is an important means by which I comprehend life and people. I have always seen something far deeper and more significant in art, than a craft or skill set for creating beautiful objects. Art figures in my life as predominantly a philosophical activity, a mode for investigating the depths of my personality as well as the myriad ways of the world.

Today, as I create, I follow a genuine wish to connect with others, to reach their human desires through expressing what I see, feel or believe. My paintings are visions of a place of harmony and balance that I discovered in myself and I wish to share. I call my style “metaphysical romanticism” and believe that aesthetic experience can foster inner balance and change lives. For me art is a universal tool for wordless communication. My creative stance and worldview value parity, the interaction between cultures, and the power of art to bridge and reconcile differences.

Oil painting is my preferred media, because of its capacity for blending and nuance. I use soft pastel palette for compositions that revolve around the concept of synthesis as a key to the universal beginning. Realistic references in my paintings are placed in an abstract context, while their artistic language strives towards maximum simplicity. Implying rather than directly portraying, I am driven by the intention to evoke a particular set of emotions, to trigger a positive feeling. To me a painting has merit only if transports the viewer beyond the ordinary to another reality—to a reality that asserts the possibility of illumination.

Vassilen Vasevski’s paintings invite the viewer to revel in color and form in the way one becomes absorbed looking through leafless trees at the changing palette of winter sunset. His works are at once austere and lyrical. Vasevski’s body of work quietly asserts the confidence associated with the trifecta of artistic curiosity, drive, and realization. Each of the works embody painterly execution of a deeply felt introspective vision.

A visual language emerges when looking at the works presented here. For example, we see motifs or images recurring in Tao of Love, Light of Your Smile, Touch Me, Feel Me, and Garden of Peace. These motifs—outstretched open hands, leaves floating in space, the hint of a smile, solitary and intimate figures—create thematic and narrative unity across the works. Yet at the same time each painting is a world unto itself. It’s the world that viewers create in their own mind while looking. One viewer might see the hands and think of Orthodox icons, another might think of Buddhist sculpture. Floating leaves simultaneously evoke the spaciousness created by fields of color and the invisible movement of air and light, thought and feeling that accompanies apparent stillness.

Visual images and motifs that suggest rather than depict are characteristic of dreams. The familiarity of Vasevski’s motifs dispel resistance and enjoin reverie. This is Vasevski’s distinctive aesthetic achievement: his paintings at once convey moments of soliloquy, longing, and intimacy and give rise to our own experiences of them.

We shall not find tragic dissonances, dramatic conflicts, complex and intricate metaphors, or inspiration drawn directly from nature in the paintings of Vassilen Vasevski. On the contrary, he invariably pursues the formation of his very own signature of simplified plasticity, which visualizes the underlying substance of the image. While at first sight his favorite motifs – faces of females in a state of reverie and self-absorption, birds, trees and leaves – may appear to reveal their respective object referents to nature, they are not drawn from life but represent poetic generalizations of obscure moods, of ambivalent frames of mind, of revelations.

The blend of delicately interwoven objects and spaces projects a peculiar poetic atmosphere, both generally accessible and refined enough to please the eye and the mind of the most discerning audience. The interconnections between backgrounds and figures are defined by an entire specter of transitional zones, subduing the sharp contours and similarly to Leonardo’s sfumato, creating the impression of unspoken mystery. The specific modes of conveying plasticity – the light and the dark, the warm and the cold, the near and the distant – are not set one against the other in contrast, but rather represent the two sides of one unified organic whole.

Although the lines are not accentuated, the paintings impress with the exquisiteness of imagery. Dominant are the large areas of color. What Vasevski favors is not the principles of classical tonal development, but those of color planes, which – through their varied combinations – form the composition, the spatial aspects, and the colorful harmony of his works.