cultural memory. I emphasise that here the technique and the process are meaning-generating, inasmuch as the artist aims (in his own words) at а ‘self-producing’ of the work. The graphite image builds itself, as it is executed in the technique of frottage, and the result deliberately obtained stands at the boundary of fortuity. In other words, this is a conceptual limitation of the rational achievement of the work that appears before the eyes of its creator in the process of rubbing the graphite onto the canvas or paper placed on a certain textured base. In fact, the already-mentioned ‘frottage’ comes from the visual experiments of Surrealism and, in particular, from Max Ernst’s drawings, leading us still further beyond the idea of an objectless art of painting closed in upon itself.

The ‘human content’ of these works is inevitably linked to the social sensitivity of the artist who, in his previous exhibitions, has publicly stated that he is interested in problems such as the planet’s catastrophic population growth, or the problem of faith through the creation of icon-like images ‘Not-Made-By-Human-Hands’. However, the fact is that no artist can stand beside his works in order to explain his concern about the eventual evolution of the artificial intellect ‘Sophia’, while his works translucently percolate all kinds of meanings. What exactly, then, stands before us?

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It is difficult to decipher in the frottages the anxiety generated by the existence of the mega-computer ‘Sophia’, for this is obviously an art that has self-restricted itself from the narrativity of the legacy of pop art and conceptualism. And this is not necessarily bad, because didactic political correctness has for decades now condemned contemporary art to an indolent predictability, which is not even especially productive, in that the impact of visual arts is principally limited and functions for specialised use among people who, one way or another, share humanistic values. In this exhibition, Milko Pavlov poses questions and seeks his creative authenticity through the enigmatic filter of the images that emerge in the mind of the viewer. We can never be absolutely sure how our consciousness will react to the graphite rubbings in question, but, in any case, the unpredictable metaphoricity of the conflict between the non-sensuous and the specific matter is present. Socio-psychological fiction is possibly a good definition of Milko Pavlov’s artworks because, formally speaking, they do not mean anything. They are materialistically concrete, but the building technique is slickly intentional and predisposes to personal empathy (or even specific judgments, who knows?). Graphite images may, for example, remind us of the Holy Shroud, simultaneously insisting on the material as a surface, but also on its corruptibility, on the fragility of human memory, on the relativity of space and time—exactly the opposite of the statistical pragmatism of artificial intelligence. Thus, in answer to the question: ‘What is this before us?’, one can formulate something of this sort: this is self-creating graphite, which is matter ambiguously going beyond itself.

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Svilen Stefanov