Poet, writer, artist, musician – a versatile personality who hates monotony and jealously guards his spontaneity as his strongest asset in everything he does. Rosen Karamfilov uses each of his talents to convey a certain message, as well as to heal the human soul. Talking to him is a privilege, beyond the obvious circumstances or environment in which he imperceptibly teaches his many lessons.

He admits that the biggest disadvantage of the pandemic is that it has managed to put many people against each other. Otherwise, he has managed to tame privacy and reap the benefits of it:

"I have already started to turn the isolation into a plus”, Karamfilov says firmly. “I use the free time I have left at home to rehearse songs, paint pictures or write. I try not to be left without work, because that would drive me crazy. Being in a state of inaction in a situation like the current one would be disastrous for me. There is also one benefit of the pandemic - along with it, people began to think about their own behaviour. In my opinion, we are moving towards the moment when we will get out of everything much kinder. That's probably the point of this whole ordeal."

What bothers him and what he misses most is the direct contact of the audience, which for now remains unthinkable. However, even in the conditions of the pandemic that has taken over our lives in the last year, the voice of the young artist remains strong and recognizable. When he decides to speak, his words are always at the heart of current social problems.

And the thing that accompanies every minute of his life is the work on his mission - to care for and talk about the heritage and the imprint left in Bulgarian culture by his father, the great Bulgarian artist Kolyo Karamfilov.

In the days of forced isolation, Rosen reworked and republished his debut novel, "Knees", telling the story of the sudden separation with his father in early 2014:

"One of the valuable qualities of this book is that it is an open, throbbing wound that you can easily see and feel and, together with the lyrical hero, experience its healing," Rosen explains. “When a person is a bit detached from this grief, they can look much more clearly and see where they have gone wrong. It was a huge challenge to get back into my old skin. Today I am a much happier and calmer person. So I tried to add a little question mark - what if the lyrical hero decided to take a breath?"

Rosen is the successor of Kolyo Karamfilov today, the continuation of that rebellious personality and innovative work which change the Bulgarian art after the democratic changes in Bulgaria and marked the beginning of the avant-garde events in the face of the Plovdiv group "Edge", which Kolyo Karamfilov was part of.

The opportunity to describe his father's personality and talent for foreign readers unfamiliar with his work was a challenge that intrigued Rosen:

"I have said before that for me, Kolyo Karamfilov's art is a shriek in a quiet room that there is a God. Another feeling of figurativeness, composition, symbols. The main thing in my father's art are his symbols, which he called signs. Whether it is an eye, a human foot, a cross or a house, these are the main things - home, faith, senses. About his art I can also say that it is not talkative and accumulated. He was laconic and staring deep inside his own soul."

English version Rositsa Petkova

Photos: Facebook /Rosen Karamfilov