Pravdoliub Ivanov
17 May - 14 Jun 2014
PRAVDOLIUB IVANOV
Chamber of Uncertainty
17 May – 14 June 2014
The exhibition placed in the narrow corridor and the small comfortable room of the Parterre Gallery is trying to create a suggestive, not apparent connection with the observed or experienced fears, worries, doubts and uncertainties of the artist. The works minimize the distance with the viewer using the principle of collective life practices and memory. Thus they provoke the audience to compare them with their own fears, doubts and confusion.
Pravdoliub Ivanov works with concrete everyday events, facts, objects, symbols and processes - fragmenting them and changing their functionality. Rearranging them into a new functional environment - supposedly created by himself but actually existing somewhere out there in the world we live in or in the near and more distant history. These new configurations may seem to be unusual but they are not abstract. They provoke ridiculous non-secret voyeurism. Watching them we really like their visual completeness, but at the same time we can fall into the labyrinth of uncertainty of our own suppressed fears.
The viewer realizes that this is a fiction, but why this fiction evokes memories and associations - on something already experienced consciously suppressed in the collective memory? This is the (non)fictional reality of Pravdoliub Ivanov, which could be determined if we allow ourselves to borrow the title The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Just such a “unbearable lightness of being” we can find in the series of drawings Disasters. The specific objects are a result of the tsunami in Japan but the documentary importance of the source is eliminated. The drawings of a ship on the roof of a house or the car accident between a car and a boat or the house on the bridge - look as if they were pedantic illustrations to a new encyclopedia of probabilities. A small percentage of probability that could easily become an axiom of the natural process of our existence.
The same awful large amount of reality accidentally creates awful large amount of fiction in the video Black Balloons. It is filmed during the antigovernment demonstrations in the summer of 2013 in Sofia. One of the protestors brought and distributed hundreds of black balloons. The protestors blew them marching by the building of the Parliament, which was heavily fenced off and blocked by the police forces. People began throwing their balloons into the guarded area. The speed of the movie is slowed down and this mainly affects the recorded sound. No any additional effects were added.
Conquerors & Conquered looks like a big "abstract painting". But the "abstraction" immediately ends if the viewer is curious and tries to read what exacly is the material that was used to create this "abstraction". In fact, the bright horizontal and vertical lines on the wall are silk ribbons of military orders. Pravdoliub Ivanov said: "This work is very easy to be “read” especially in Europe, where each country has been a winner and a loser. Where sometimes the losers live better than the winners. Where one and the same battle is celebrated by both sides as a victory ... " Generally the political history is a not-perfect game where the lack of transparency sets many of the rules of the game.
Therefore the next installation There are No Perfect Games could be interpreted in similar but also in many different ways. The artist ripped up a few footballs. Then turned their inner side and sewed them up again. Thus the lining is turned in the front part. The invisible becomes visible. This dissection reveals the lack of perfection in the internal structure of a seemingly perfect object. Can be seen the curves and the rough seams and even marks left by the people who made those balls.
The idea of this work is inspired by the interest in collective games, and more generally by the phenomenon of the game, not least as Wittgenstein analyses it. This is a literal and deliberately naive attempt to decode what is behind the scenes of one or other "collective game".
The artistic manipulation on the hidden mechanisms of reality continues in What You See. The neon construction creates discomfort when the viewer tries to read it. This is because the sign is composed of two levels. The top line: "What You See Is ..." makes it difficult to read the bottom line: "Not What You Get".
The slogan "What You See Is What You Get" originated in trade packages in the 1950s in the United States. Later, Frank Stella was transformed it into: "What You See, is What You See." Pravdoliub Ivanov re-transformed it and exhibited it as white neon on a white wall. In this way he manipulates vision of a classic minimalist work. But the meaning of this work is quite far from the meaning of minimalist art.
Some invisible force has overcome the existing gravity and has led a pencil to write: "Mystic Truths" on the column at the room of Parterre Gallery. The work Mystic Truths can be interpreted rationally and irrationally. In the first option we would say that it is text editing of the work by Bruce Nauman: "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths".
The irrational explanation of the mysterious pencil is determined by inadvertent surprise. Phenomena arising because of the mystical truths and the physical invisibility and inscrutability of that by which they can reach us.
Generally all of the works in this exhibition create two invisible doors in the space. If we go through the first door, we could accomplish an extramural dialogue with the artist about his motives. They are often provoked by a mix of personal life mythology, the latest news, the historical topography or the glorification of everyday life.
If we decide to go through the second door - then we have to give up our own cultural prejudices and then let ourselves into the storm of our deeply repressed trauma
Boris Kostadinov
Chamber of Uncertainty
17 May – 14 June 2014
The exhibition placed in the narrow corridor and the small comfortable room of the Parterre Gallery is trying to create a suggestive, not apparent connection with the observed or experienced fears, worries, doubts and uncertainties of the artist. The works minimize the distance with the viewer using the principle of collective life practices and memory. Thus they provoke the audience to compare them with their own fears, doubts and confusion.
Pravdoliub Ivanov works with concrete everyday events, facts, objects, symbols and processes - fragmenting them and changing their functionality. Rearranging them into a new functional environment - supposedly created by himself but actually existing somewhere out there in the world we live in or in the near and more distant history. These new configurations may seem to be unusual but they are not abstract. They provoke ridiculous non-secret voyeurism. Watching them we really like their visual completeness, but at the same time we can fall into the labyrinth of uncertainty of our own suppressed fears.
The viewer realizes that this is a fiction, but why this fiction evokes memories and associations - on something already experienced consciously suppressed in the collective memory? This is the (non)fictional reality of Pravdoliub Ivanov, which could be determined if we allow ourselves to borrow the title The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Just such a “unbearable lightness of being” we can find in the series of drawings Disasters. The specific objects are a result of the tsunami in Japan but the documentary importance of the source is eliminated. The drawings of a ship on the roof of a house or the car accident between a car and a boat or the house on the bridge - look as if they were pedantic illustrations to a new encyclopedia of probabilities. A small percentage of probability that could easily become an axiom of the natural process of our existence.
The same awful large amount of reality accidentally creates awful large amount of fiction in the video Black Balloons. It is filmed during the antigovernment demonstrations in the summer of 2013 in Sofia. One of the protestors brought and distributed hundreds of black balloons. The protestors blew them marching by the building of the Parliament, which was heavily fenced off and blocked by the police forces. People began throwing their balloons into the guarded area. The speed of the movie is slowed down and this mainly affects the recorded sound. No any additional effects were added.
Conquerors & Conquered looks like a big "abstract painting". But the "abstraction" immediately ends if the viewer is curious and tries to read what exacly is the material that was used to create this "abstraction". In fact, the bright horizontal and vertical lines on the wall are silk ribbons of military orders. Pravdoliub Ivanov said: "This work is very easy to be “read” especially in Europe, where each country has been a winner and a loser. Where sometimes the losers live better than the winners. Where one and the same battle is celebrated by both sides as a victory ... " Generally the political history is a not-perfect game where the lack of transparency sets many of the rules of the game.
Therefore the next installation There are No Perfect Games could be interpreted in similar but also in many different ways. The artist ripped up a few footballs. Then turned their inner side and sewed them up again. Thus the lining is turned in the front part. The invisible becomes visible. This dissection reveals the lack of perfection in the internal structure of a seemingly perfect object. Can be seen the curves and the rough seams and even marks left by the people who made those balls.
The idea of this work is inspired by the interest in collective games, and more generally by the phenomenon of the game, not least as Wittgenstein analyses it. This is a literal and deliberately naive attempt to decode what is behind the scenes of one or other "collective game".
The artistic manipulation on the hidden mechanisms of reality continues in What You See. The neon construction creates discomfort when the viewer tries to read it. This is because the sign is composed of two levels. The top line: "What You See Is ..." makes it difficult to read the bottom line: "Not What You Get".
The slogan "What You See Is What You Get" originated in trade packages in the 1950s in the United States. Later, Frank Stella was transformed it into: "What You See, is What You See." Pravdoliub Ivanov re-transformed it and exhibited it as white neon on a white wall. In this way he manipulates vision of a classic minimalist work. But the meaning of this work is quite far from the meaning of minimalist art.
Some invisible force has overcome the existing gravity and has led a pencil to write: "Mystic Truths" on the column at the room of Parterre Gallery. The work Mystic Truths can be interpreted rationally and irrationally. In the first option we would say that it is text editing of the work by Bruce Nauman: "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths".
The irrational explanation of the mysterious pencil is determined by inadvertent surprise. Phenomena arising because of the mystical truths and the physical invisibility and inscrutability of that by which they can reach us.
Generally all of the works in this exhibition create two invisible doors in the space. If we go through the first door, we could accomplish an extramural dialogue with the artist about his motives. They are often provoked by a mix of personal life mythology, the latest news, the historical topography or the glorification of everyday life.
If we decide to go through the second door - then we have to give up our own cultural prejudices and then let ourselves into the storm of our deeply repressed trauma
Boris Kostadinov