If it were needed, here is the confirmation that art goes hand in hand with life. Companion but above all teacher. Able to direct events, to trace the direction, to dig a trace, to ride a destiny. Irena Dragova was born in Burgas, a tourist-industrial town in Bulgaria on the east coast of the Black Sea, crossed by the glories and nefarious of history. Crucial junction on the geographical level, Thracians, Greeks, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Ottomans, Goths, Byzantines and finally Bulgarians passed through it. Everyone left and took something, giving life to a layered and complex identity still today, where however "every time I come back the song of the seagulls and the panorama of the wheat fields that look out over the sea open my heart". Precisely this hint of poetry and nostalgia grafted on a thunderous story that does not discount, like adolescence under the communist regime, connotes the present of Irena Dragova, which has been taking place in Switzerland, in Ticino since the mid-90s. In the meantime, where he found a way to position himself professionally - degree in business administration, marketing specialization - and finally to devote himself to art, realizing the dream he always carried in his heart. He followed the stages of a robust training, courses and stages between Italy and Switzerland including at the Peccia Sculpture School, he began to create and perfect his path ("which finally allowed me to better express my inner world" ) dedicating himself to sculpture. "I love what I do, and I do it with great enthusiasm and passion".
I would add conviction and competence, since his sculptures are signed, so to speak. That is, unequivocal, strongly hers, marked by sure, unmistakable traits. In the game of comparisons, in the search for ancestry and derivations, for points of reference and masters, he emerges with the traits of his originality. Obviously Switzerland has proved to be an excellent point of observation for her on contemporary art too, immersed as it is in one of its great artistic history and in the critical attention to what is happening in and around it. Also here Irena Dragova it has found that intertwining of conflicts and pacifications, that alternation of encounters and clashes that have defined its identity. But above all in the delicate balance of this cultural complexity of ours, he developed the conviction that yes, it was possible to follow one's own expressive path, to identify through the work of art a sort of reconciliation between the many elements in conflict with each other. That it was and is possible to put order within that jumble in which historical and personal, emotional and rational reasons coexist, and all try to manifest themselves, in some way to prevail.
The acknowledgments received say that he is on the right track, but the fact that he continues to research, to deepen the history of art, to experiment with fervor, to believe that hope is in the work, confirms it even more. Then he throws himself on the material, whether it is clay, plaster or wax. He works it, shapes it, smoothes it, stretches it, compresses it, leaves its marks. Then he melts it in bronze. In the mental definition of his works he manages to stubbornly insert a tactile element, which becomes distinctive. A manual foundation, very strong craftsmanship, through which he gives an imprint to his idea. So that the symbolic and inner significance, always present in his sculptures, has a strong, indissoluble connection with reality, with days and places, with the territory (“Revenant”). Like those large, gnarled elongated hands (“Father's Hand” but also “Femscale”) which at the same time create contrast and balance in the figures; those elongated, filiform limbs, arms and legs like suspended threads, like sides and angles of geometric figures (“Pierluigi”), like supports with crushed heads and astonished faces that scrutinize and seek direction. Sometimes supported by circular elements, by well-founded reasons, such as to allow more stable balances (“Hanged Man”). Then his human figures are also territories and animals (the case of "Hybrid" is interesting and courageous), they have metamorphoses in them, Ovid and Kafka come to mind in that continuous historical coming and going, which is one of the fundamental elements of the bronze structures by Irena Dragova. So that the technique of modeling bronze, in which Irena Dragova reveals herself as finely expert, in her works finds a well-balanced formal conciliation with more essential and familiar elements such as the circle, which maintains its symbolic value while becoming a structural element by absorbing and distributing the torment of an intense and profound modeling.
His figures are bodies in evolution. While they become an expression of attitudes and above all of moods, torments and emotions, of that daily struggle that is living, at the same time they seek new conformations, more suitable ways of expressing themselves, as if in search of subtle balances within which specific parts of the human figure take over: the bust, the torso, the back, the abdomen ... To say that Irena Dragova's research is indeed a formal and structural type of research (those points that are heads, those threads that are limbs, those hands that look like suckers and portions of territory, those shiny and differently coated backs that recall technological references ...), but it is above all a philosophical study. It is an answer to his existential questions. It is the declination of his constant questioning (as in the case of "Regret" or "Man of the Moon"). It is the acrobatic structural and even somewhat poetic solution to eminently modern themes such as loneliness ("Falling Moon"), questions about time and space, desire and the inability-impossibility to see and understand things (" Blind Man ").
Irena Dragova's bronzes never cease to question themselves, to seek solutions, to find answers to existential questions. They are eminently modern in their methodical search for reasons why it is worth living and, in living, realizing oneself.
