Plain / 2019
Stanimir Genov’s new exhibition, especially created for Contemporary Space, is entitled Plain. The exhibition consists of five canvases, which embody the material expression of the works, at the same time they are 5 squared, minus 5 x 2 = 15 compositional variations. The modular system of the plane is recreated in perfect decorative forms, which, however, vibrate under the tension of their inner intersected or unreached color denouement. It was left under the stencil, erased or unpainted, invisible anyway. The situation, in which Genov sets things in his characteristic style, is tense as an emotion and powerful as a phenomenon that opens up references to several current problems in art that are mutually derivative as before. Functions of his diverse experience not only in art.
One of the problems is basic, distinctive, so to speak. This is the passion for completeness. In Bulgarian art, this is a remarkable problem in its scope. A victim of or successor to a certain cultural overlays, perhaps temperament and education oblige the Bulgarian author to finish whatever he has taken up. Only a “pain” should remain from the “painting” because the rest is completed.
The other problem is fixed on something like fear of decorativeness. However, this problem just seems like fear of decorativeness, in fact, it is the artist’s denial of thinking through a model, logic, reckoning, of gaining insights, which has turned from basic intellectual practice into an eccentric marginal manifestation. To not reach concreteness can be considered as aesthetic pluralism, but it is more often due to sluggishness rather than to passion.
The third problem, which the title and the second problem suggest, lies in the plane. As it becomes clear from the foregoing problem, here, Genov concurrently considers a flat and a plane, i.e. two concepts (physical/geographical and mathematical) bearing one name. Actually, it is the same thing but presented once as a phenomenon and then as a model. As a phenomenon, the plane is known in art, the latter serves the plane and subjects it to interpretations in a wide range of (creative) darings.
It is more interestingly, however, that the exhibition is involved in exploring the plane as a model, a scheme. The canvas titles, akin in terms of contents, are graded from 1 to 2, but their places do not correspond to the numbering. Composing them in the exhibition sets the syntactic approach in structuring and reading the project. Shifting the works appears natural, while their current arrangement speaks of another order, something that has been taken into account, about which the viewer has no prior information. From a physical point of view, there is nowhere to find a solution to the composition. The mathematical (point of view), however, comes with the invaluable contribution of abstraction and conventionality, and here, in the definition, the viewer also finds his place: In Euclidean space, a plane is defined by: three points not lying on one line; a straight line and a point not lying on the straight line; a point and a straight line perpendicular to the plane; two intersecting or parallel lines …
Yovo Panchev
