Paintings / 2012

Paintings / 2012

„PAINTINGS“ The story that always unfolds around oeuvres of painting, the so called „paintings” has always been limited or rather restrained to the use of language. Whenever it has succeeded to escape from the descriptiveness of imagery, at the intersection with art, a piece degrades to a semantic phrase the moment it faces the viewer-interpreter. The problem of language, however, is that it is incapable of reaching directly those layers of the human psyche, that are accessible through the use of metaphor, myth, allegory and other trespassing-further forms. Here, the poetics of the anthropomorphic shapes of these flesh-thick creatures, organs and members are tied up in compositionally impossible knots. Stanimir Genov attacks the layers of the psyche literally with thick paint, untouchable by other means. On them, he uses the conventional canvas as a hellish representational screen where the signs of struggle are left, exposing or illuminating numbers of pathological silhouettes hiding in the white. These are silhouettes of autonomous organs „organically” clenched into each other. A knot that can describe or refer, but moreover acts pre (and post) verbally, outside the realm of language, beyond and beside the system. So, around the so called „paintings” a story develops and begins unfolding. A story about the system and its inconsistence, of the horribly defective life forms stacked within it. The story goes on about a hellish congregation of autonomous organs, but should not continue in order to preserve the „painting”.

Compressed between the world of Rubens and Roubens Barricello (a formula 1 pilot), Francis Bacon and „South Park”, unfolds here in already classical in terms of the creative process approach. The former painter returns to this form of expression in a way that one may see as raw or too crude, but he wouldn’t get here if it was not for his systematic artistic explorations of human experience and behavior in situations of panic, bewilderment, turmoil, vulnerability, crowd, fixed in his videos and installations. After having put the audience in various situations and emotional landscapes with his „paintings” the artist once again provokes a situational perception of his work. It is set as a gesture, which Genov declares a form of self exorcism. Sincerely, he uses himself and his life experience as the subject of his painting, because of his delicacy and rigorous pursuit towards an understanding of the subject of his artistic works.

The „paintings” of Stanimir Genov reactivate that quality of art that features the object both as physical object, as well as escaping image, elusive of reality and its references. They maintain the tension between illusion and reality in a typical and recognizable approach toward painting in a postmodern application. Holding up the highest standards of perfectly actualized aesthetics, these nouvelle works by Stanimir Genov vow a serene greeting to the delta contemporary (after Krassimir Delchev).
Yovo Panchev