Undefeated 1973

Georgi Kovachev made this portrait, Undefeated, with paint on canvas. The head emerges from a ghostly blue oval, a vertical red line connecting the forehead to the mouth. It looks like the paint has been wiped, added to, reworked. I wonder if it began as something else. Look at the mouth, two horizontal lines that don’t quite meet, making this stoic face seem unsure, hesitant. What does undefeated mean in this context? Is this the artist? Is he showing us something about the struggle of being an artist? The colors are muted and grey, aside from that red line, which I read as a scar. It reminds me of Picasso’s portraits, the way he would abstract and fragment the face to convey emotion. Here Kovachev has done something similar, stripping down the features to their bare essentials. It's a reminder of the power of simplicity, and the ways in which paint can be used to create both an image and an idea.