Recently, while on the phone with an abstract painter who continued working as we spoke, she described the prospect of leaving her studio for an impending dinner as akin to communion with God. Painting without a roadmap—responding to one gesture after the next—requires a kind of faith, a complete trust in what unfolds. “Everything begins in doubt,” the poet Anne Carson said. It is this ongoing, sustained devotion, these repeated gestures of desire that saturate the surfaces of the canvases in Milko Pavlov’s exhibition at the Julian Schnabel Foundation, where they leap off the wooden slatted walls.

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The Bulgarian-born, Berlin-based painter’s first solo exhibition in the United States arose from a chance encounter. At Galerie Max Hetzler in 2021, artist Julian Schnabel and his son, Cy, noticed a visitor studying Schnabel’s paintings at an unusually close range, inches from the canvases. Recognizing that kind of scrupulous attention as the mark of a fellow painter, they approached and introduced themselves. The visitor was Milko Pavlov, who then shared images on his iPhone documenting his recent exhibition at a church in Ratingen, Germany. A studio visit quickly followed, leading to an exhibition organized by Cy in San Sebastián and to representation by his Madrid-based gallery, Villa Magdalena.

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Born in 1956 in Aytos, Bulgaria, raised by two doctors and coming of age before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Pavlov first encountered art through books filled with medical illustrations. Under the artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism, state-sponsored art was expected to be optimistic, legible, and ideologically aligned with the state. With little else available, he turned to the National Museum, where he became enamored by the reverse “Byzantine” perspective of medieval Christian icons. Rather than functioning as a window onto the world, this mode constructs a space of encounter. Distant objects are often rendered larger, collapsing depth so the background presses forward into the viewer’s “spiritual field.” The resulting spatial instability carries into Pavlov’s paintings, where perception feels as much psychological as optical. A spiritual transformation through color and space, in its own right.

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Pavlov’s paintings hover between the naturalistic and the abstract with only the faintest suggestions of landscapes or figuration. Less concerned with image than with process, they read as sustained investigations into painting itself. In B.V. 2117/4 МРП 2033 (2021), a warm fuchsia- and amber-hued painting on the back wall, whipped cirrus-like forms swirl behind and crash into a jagged cardamom cliff, as if glimpsed through a dust storm on Mars. Below, a distressed field of scarlet and lavender is punctuated by yellow flecks, like stars breaking through the atmosphere.

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A refusal of stasis distinguishes Pavlov’s work. Elements advance and recede, merging, overlapping, contradicting one another. Color moves and the figure-ground relationship remains unstable—effects that stem in part from his fluency in watercolor and frottage. Energetic swathes of bright, contrasting hues, like turquoise painted in one direction against a mass of yellowish black going in another, recall Amy Sillman’s essay “On Color,” in which she describes being more interested in color as “an engine of ongoing change and metamorphosis than as a static theory.” In P.F 2125 МРП 2045 (2023), chestnut bands pulled horizontally wobble like hair blown across a field of robin’s egg blue. Color operates across multiple planes, moving in different directions and opacities, with a primal shifting quality, always in the process of becoming.

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Assemblies of pigment press forward from behind one another, dissolving solidity back into space. It is often unclear where one thing ends and another begins. For a moment, the blue field reads as sky, holding a mound of discordant hues—beige, rusty ochre, kelly green—applied in downward strokes that suggest a mountain, until the same blue surfaces through it. If I were scaling that mountain, I’d be toast. Inside Pavlov’s paintings, I’m lost in color. I don’t really know how I got there or how to get out. It is unmistakably a kind of divinity.

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As Cy Schnabel observes, “the presence of environments are in the process of forming as we discover them.” It recalls a conversation I had with Pavlov (a polyglot who moves fluidly between English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Bulgarian) about his abiding interest in quantum physics, which feels inseparable from the work. We spoke about the thought experiments he turns over while painting, from Shrödinger’s cat to Plato’s cave. He offered one of his own: “Imagine if Johannes Vermeer wanted to make an abstract painting, and he made one that nobody saw. It exists somewhere hidden, and I, as an artist, have to uncover it four hundred years later.” This speculative archaeology may be the essence of his practice. Pavlov is, in a sense, a time traveler. For over two decades, he has dated his paintings in the future. When I asked if he had faith in the future, he replied, “The future is always a hope,” adding, “For me, art has to give hope.”

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Lola Kramer is a critic and curator whose work has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Artnet, among others. Recently, she organized Dorothea Rockburne’s first European survey exhibition, spanning fifty years, at a gallery in London.