Svilen Stefanov’s painting is, it seems to me, deliberately charged with a certain “duality” and possesses both a literal and a symbolic subtext. As a culturally “burdened” artist, he observes certain traditional conventions of the painterly medium. His paintings are, as one would expect, executed in oil on canvas. As a rule, they are constructed within an emphatically horizontal, panoramically oriented compositional frame, in two contrasting planes. The artist’s personal visual worldview leads us through the banal toward paradox and parable. Beyond the triviality and absurdism of the texts and images lies a significant associative and conceptual layer, guiding the more experienced viewer toward an ambivalent reading of the visual image. The play with the English language is no coincidence: it refers us to the established clichés and conventions of the contemporary Art World. We encounter an original form of painting that seems to negate itself and, to a large extent, to parody itself. Why? In all likelihood, this is in some sense inevitable in articulating the deliberate tension between the different, often difficult-to-reconcile poles and fragments of our inner “Self,” within the infinity of that world which we unsuccessfully and, most likely, illusorily attempt to master and piece together.
