80 kilometers away from Brussels, the little Belgian village of Geel hides an extremely interesting artistic phenomenon, a phenomenon known from the angle of the processes in modern plastic art, but unusual as a choice of a collector’s passion.

Mr. Hugo Voeten, a prospering and famous businessman, manifests a unabated interest in Bulgarian painting. His collector’s activities started spontaneously, without any preliminary plans or intentions but gradually turned into a passion that obsesses him more and more. The reason might be hiding in the art itself – in its universality but also in its uniqueness and particular features. Besides, as Mr. Voeten says – in its national Bulgarian specificity.

There are many examples when the attractive opportunity to arrange the parallel worlds of artists from Europe, Asia and America, to seek the specific connection and comparison between different styles and conceptions of the world was the main collector’s stimulus. What could tempt Mr. Voeten who collects Bulgarian art pieces? Undoubtedly the intensive and powerful charm of a culture of thousands-years-old traditions, the feeling of plastic and form that has marked generations of artistic activities, the might of a national creative spirit. Not less strongly sound however the arguments for a concrete artistic presence of every different author. In this respect the presence of the sculpture as the collection’s core should be stressed as well as the fact that the modern Bulgarian sculptors demonstrate a presence that turns them into authors standing beyond the dimensions and limits of a national culture. From the aspect of the artistic qualities the modern Bulgarian sculpture has an actual, powerful and unique sound. The hundreds of decares open-air park area in Geel where more than 300 art works by modern Bulgarian artists are displayed are more than impressive. And not with their number and volume but with the significant categorical plastic achievement, with the professionalism and the clearness of the artistic expression. Here we can discover authors and works defined classical in Bulgarian art:

“Toreadors” and “A Head of Picasso” by Krum Damyanov, “Figure” by Alexander Apostolov, “A Woman with a Ball” and “Sitting Figures” by Pavel Koichev, works of the authors of the next generations as Bozhidar Kozarev “Two Figures”, Emil Popov “Three Dancing Figures”, Snezhana Simeonova “Woman”, Ivan Slavov “Father and Son”. Together with the youngests artists as Hari Arabyan with “Head” and “Figure”, Plamen Avramov with “Metal Figure”, Venelin Ivanov with “Two Faces” and “Next Reincarnation”, they form a real panorama of modern Bulgarian plastic art.

The fact of a national, Bulgarian artistic presence in Belgium is natural and justified both from an artistic point of view and from the viewpoint of a future development of art processes in global aspect. The fate has chosen Mr. Voeten for master mind and zealous implementator of the idea of the interrelatedness and contacts between the different artistic and plastic traditions. And as it usually happens this choice for Mr. Voeten was accompanied by the spontaneous joy of the discoverer, the discoverer of new artistic worlds and eternal human values.

Boris Danailov