Phenix Varbanov

Phénix Varbanov was born in 1962, in Sofia, into the family of the artists Marin Varbanov and Song Huai-Kuei. After studying at the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he studied at the Chinese Art Academy in Hangzhou. His interest in traditional Chinese techniques with Chinese ink on paper dates back to 1985, when he was working at the Chinese Central Academy of Fine Arts in Peking. He presented his first works in China, and then at the Pierre Cardin Gallery in Paris in the same year; since then he has continued working with paper and ink. This exhibition marked his permanent interest for the circular format where Yin and Yang, the feminine and masculine energies, dark and light, sometimes embrace each other tenderly and sometimes confront each other ferociously.

For about twenty years now, Phénix Varbanov has been using different techniques such as painting, drawing, installations and photography. The pure product of a cosmopolitan and polymorphous culture, Phénix adopts from here and there whatever suits his current thinking: from China, the taste for working with ink on paper, and for certain western techniques like rubbing, the influences of Arte Povera and Conceptual Art, as well as for the great Abstract Art movement of the 1950's. He has been experimenting with the multiple possibilities of imprints by rubbing abstract patterns that are often quite geometrical, of wrinkling and folding of paper, of the immense variety made possible by the saturation or diluting of inks, often in black but also in polychrome. His works are presented in the form of long flexible rectangles that can be rolled up and unrolled and which offer infinite combinations resulting from the density or fluidity of the matter and the lightness of the support.