Peter Mitchev is one of the most peculiar contemporary bulgarian painters. In the last two decades, when his talant developed entirely, he frankly and consecutively carried out his parallel, unintercepted with the common spate, line of creation, following his inside impulse and listening to his immpeccable art instinct - rather hidden than advertized, with an incredible energy and a will for work.

From the early works of the painter, marked by a quiet melancholy and packed in the blanket of refined monochromic “ sfumato “, up to the latest works, which compete in complexity and depth of pictorial tone with the ancient precious mosaic, Peter Mitchev passed the stages of one logic and brilliantly defended individual creative evolution. The strenght of the intuitive beginning that defines the appearance of the pictorial image straight on the canvas, without preliminary designes or compositional versions, is like the psychophysical transmission of images, engendered obscurely where and when, enigmatic and inexplicable.

Peter Mitchev is using the whole “ stock-in-trade “ of his painting device -brush, pallet, fingers, needle, in order to build a complicated polyphonic texture; to form the exquisiteness and the decorative charm of the ornament; to stylize or mould freely; to differentiate plastic the figures and the surrounding.The humans` faces in his paintings are not the usual characters or actors, taking part in a kind of a play, story or situation - but rather plastic signes, locked in themselves, strange and opaque “ monads “, fixed by the force of the painters` imagination to the putative metaphysical space, where the attributes, the gestures, the location of the bodies assume a second, “ magic “ meaning. In those frieze-like compositions is detected something from the Egypt reliefs; something from the processions of Piero de la Franceska; in the symmetry of the composition and the intensive freeze of the figure - reminiscences from the Byzantic and the oldbulgarian icon; in the mosaic decorativeness - drifts from the secession of Gustav Klimt. The painter likes the reiterated iconographic motives, the original combination between the surface-decorative basement of the background and the threedimensional density of the faces - lighted up from inside, sinked in a quiet trance.

The attained original symbiosis between the iconographic beginning, surrealism and symbolism is a personal achievement of Peter Mitchev and represents one of his most essential and original contributions in the rich panorama of the bulgarian contemporary art; in fact, it is a subjective view of a painter who absorbed both the ancient national traditions and is open up for the modern conception of the world. .

Chavdar Popov
M.A./art criticism
Doctor in the Institute for Science of art in the Bulgarian Academy of Science