Svilen Stefanov: Forever Lost

22.11.2018 - 19.01.2019

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The art of Svilen Stefanov is, I believe, deliberately charged with a certain "duality" and has both literal and symbolic meaning. As a culturally "burdened" artist, the author respects some traditional conventions of the pictorial media. His paintings, as it is customary, are on canvas, painted with oil paint. As a rule, they are built in a distinctly horizontally positioned, panoramic-oriented compositional frame, in two contrasting planes.

The personal plastic worldview of the author leads us through the banal, the paradox and the parable. Beyond the triviality and absurdity of the texts and images, lies a significant associative and conceptual layer that points the more tempted viewer towards an ambivalent reading of the visual image. It is no coincidence that the English references relate to word games of the established clichés and conventions of the modern Art World.

We encounter an original depiction, that seems to deny itself, which is largely self-parodying. Why? Probably, in a sense, this is unavoidable in the expression of the strain of tension between the various, often hard-to-do, poles and pieces of our inner self, in the infinity of that world which, unsuccessfully and in all probability, we chimerically attempt to master and assemble.

Chavdar Popov