Largo Art Gallery presents the artist Drago Dochev with a solo exhibition of paintings, sculpture, digital artworks and a series of digital works that are uploaded to the blockchain and presented as NFT. The title of the exhibition is "The Imaginerium Cabinet" and is the first of the series of "New Horizons" exhibitions of the Largo Gallery, in which we will present young artists up to 35 years old, at the beginning of their artistic journey, and we will give them a field for expression and creative realization. These exhibitions are carried out with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.

The whole series of works was created as part of a cycle, about which Drago shares:
"In 2022 I started the cycle The Imaginarium Cabinet (The Cabinet of the Imaginary). It is the result of my entire journey as a visual artist. It consists of experimental digital art, painting and sculpture that complement each other. The exhibition shows several directions. The first is my attempt to get out of the two-dimensionality of the painting space, experimenting with unconventional materials such as polyurethane foam and epoxy resin, giving an unnatural plasticity to the easel painting. In this way, I try to overcome the barrier between painting and sculptural bas-relief. The second is my exploration of the cartoonish and grotesque of animated creatures inspired by the Gothic gargoyles placed as fountains on buildings. The third direction is expressed in "The Battle Between Reality and Imagination". The work of the same name depicts people devoid of imagination. They are ruled by comic character gods. Their caricature is expressed in invisibility. To the unimaginative, it (imagination) is "invisible". They are condemned to experience its absence and yet it exists in parallel.”

In Drago Dochev's exhibition, the main place is occupied by his digital works, which will be presented in the gallery through a multimedia projection. The painting, digital prints and sculpture that viewers will see are created to materialize through classical means the author's ideas developed for the virtual space. All of Dochev's digital works in the exhibition are uploaded as NFTs on various platforms.

What is behind the much discussed in the last 2 years NFT? The term is English: non-fungible token and means an irreplaceable token. It is a digital record existing on a blockchain (the digital database) and representing a contract, certificate or proof of ownership. In practice, each NFT is unique, unrepeatable and therefore impossible to equivalently exchange with another NFT. Behind each NFT can stand different, at the discretion of its owner or creator, valuable/priceless real or virtual things. NFTs can be photos, videos, but also statuses or posts of a famous person on Twitter or Instagram, video game skins, virtual properties, collectibles and what not. In the world of art, NFTs have taken off with a flying start, and in effect, they have helped transform digital artworks into one-of-a-kind, verifiable assets that can be traded on the blockchain system, bought and sold via cryptocurrency.

Auction houses such as Christie's and Sotheby's, major art collectors, major contemporary art fairs such as Art Basel, curators and gallerists have turned their attention to this emerging market for digital artwork. As a result of this development, artists have an increased chance for presentation, getting noticed by curators and collectors, reaching a wider audience of viewers and connoisseurs.

In his exhibition at Art Gallery Largo, Drago Dochev shows video and works that are inspired by his interests in the work of Dutch and German artists who worked in the early Middle Ages. Their desire to fill the picture space as much as possible with figures and objects is explained by their "fear of the void", from the Latin "Horror Vacui". Dochev shares, "Aesthetically, the pictorial space is filled with a figural amalgam and is influenced by Aristotle's idea that nature abhors empty space."

At the same time, the native of Varna, as a modern artist, cannot escape the influence of the environment and his works - videos and prints, turn out to be populated with comic characters, animated characters with a flashy color, overexposed to a grotesque extreme. Of these extreme artistic endeavors, Drago shares, "A huge part of the inspiration to create this series of digital clips is Jean Baudrillard's philosophical analysis of places like Disneyland: 'The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a machine of deterrence, which aims to restore the fiction of the real from its reverse side. Which defines the feebleness of this imaginary, its infantile ugliness. The world of Disneyland pretends to be childish in order to assert a belief.