ONE Gallery
presents
COMMON
Official Opening
November 11, 4 PM – 8 PM
Artists
Stela Vasileva / Stoyan Ilev / Yuliy Takov / Maya Stoykova / Kalina Mavrodieva
Curators
Yovo Panchev, Bilyana Tsanova, Ivo Ivanov
This exhibition traces a line that is not particularly prominent in contemporary art, yet serves as the common thread between the works, their authors, and their shared positions regarding art.
In a research modality, the works unfold a formal thesis on state as content, and on the dimensions of the presence and absence of the human figure in space. In what way is the figure present in space today? What are its images and how do we experience the figure through experience—as a human absence or a formal presence, as staffage, as a factor in image-making and the determination of the scale of space, as a reason for creating space, for its manifestation in that other, artistic reality.
Questions surrounding the figure in space may sound archaic and academic. This would be the case if they were not placed in the particular context of today. Again, through the experience of real life—saturated with figures at one moment, emptied of them and desolate at another. Every context and micro-era bears characteristic traits, except perhaps the current one. It is anything but characteristic; it is inhuman. In it, there is no spatial coordinate system in which the figure and its essence can be physically and symbolically inscribed and defined. There is no visible horizon at all, or it is so close that no depth or space remains in the composition to be inhabited by the ‘here and now.’ Life is poster-like; painting can reveal this.
Through the works presented here, one slowly arrives at a surprising answer. The essential element in contemporary painting turns out to be the recreation of state as content. But this is not a contemporary or even a modern concept; it is the primordial thesis that saturates ‘paintings’ with spirit and flesh simultaneously. This is the commonality in painting. With its classical tone, it stands behind what makes art relevant, above what defines it as contemporary, below or before the ideas of conceptualizing the image or expression, or simply the thematic situation—and far, far ahead of human experience, ahead of life. With such coordinates, we speculatively place painting in a prophetic role, but this is no surprise to connoisseurs; for those who still doubt, take this small theory and apply it to a given context—moment, territory, and manifestation. With all the power of the imagination and, of course, the works in this exhibition.
