In an aquarelle portrait retrospect, Vezhdi Rashidov meets us with his own artistic development in time – from the first serious events of the young sculptor to the works of a mature artist. Dangerous and risky commensurability, in which, fortunately, the youthful self-esteem and the experience of the years meet in the overall image of a non-standard creator, with his own path and creative behavior, with his own visual system – expressive and sharp as sensitivity, raw and gentle as radiance. An unprejudiced view on this portrait gallery, free from the public mythologization and demonization of the author, will reveal the true sculptor, built and born on cultural layers in which the archaic, antiquity, pagan mysteries and lessons of modern sculpture are its spiritual and plastic home. In this home, the author has greeted Cesar and Slona, Liacho and Emil Stoychev, Krastan Dyankov and Dimovski, Petyo Blaskov, Georgi Trifonov and Ivan Kozhuharov, acquaintances, friends and strangers and gave them as a gift his author’s uniqueness. Touched once by a sculpture, they are beyond the fleeting passions and favoritisms, and they belong to the lasting life of plastic knowledge.
Even with his first works in granite, Vezhdi found himself in a figurative imagery, structural and synthetic, which, over the years and experience, passed into an acute expressive form, spatial and alive, in which the characteristic and typological were brought to significant symbolism. Furthermore, the time, the circumstances and responsibilities largely calmed the author’s bohemian frivolity and freed his sculpture from verbal clichés and public complexes.
Sculpture is an art of silence. It does not need words and evidence. It is out of office and administrative positions and dependence. They can prevent it, but they cannot create it. I believe that, based on his own experience, Vezhdi has reason to be grateful to the fate for giving him a complex, difficult and controversial nature. And the sculptor, before being a sculptor, is a character.
