Iskren Semkov began his artistic career as a graffiti artist, today his fantastic paintings are classified as trompe-l’œil painting. This developed during the Renaissance and goes hand in hand with the discovery of perspective and scientific advances in the field of optics. The painters often used as motifs niches with still lifes of flowers and fruits, small furniture (shelves, cabinets) with jewels, board walls with graphics and letters as well as hunting still lifes with game and weapons. Often one motif was depicted by the same artist in several variants.
In this tradition, Iskren Semkov paints his motifs in the manner of the old masters: series of butterflies and realistically painted sections of nature: sandy beaches that arouse the desire to dive in with bare toes, wooden boards and stone walls on which seemingly real insects sit; confusing perspectives in the manner of Escher, eyes painted on illusionistic paper flocks with a view into an uncertain distance, and small objects – e.g. keys, locks, and other objects. e.g. keys, locks, clocks – that refer to Freud’s interpretation of dreams.
