There is always someone, somewhere, cutting something with an angle-grinder ® B

 

Within only about a year, the inscription I saw for the first time at the Image.bg (2007) exhibition made around of the streets of Sofia, apparead on Elenko Eleknov’s blog, became the motto of a short story by Anton Terziev, and received every possible interpretation in profiles, forums, chats, etc. online spaces.

In a number of its uses, the inscription actually turned into a slogan with an overturned functionality. The generality of its message expresses a very concrete, ordinary, physical activity which is much more associated with the production process and is not backed by a specific corporate image, neither by a PR strategy.

The inscription is made by Vikenti Komitski, and the strange manner of its existence depicts a logic of communication between the artist and the unknown, accidental viewer, always rather a likely one than one actually present, wherein the boundaries of the determinate, communication adjusted spaces are easily trespassed: the publicity of the gallery is replaced by the publicity of the street, the physical links and immediate presence and communication continue in the rush, the randomness and the networks of visual spaces. The figure of the artist himself steps in as a mediator who plays by interfering with them.

Employing the logic of ready-made objectivity and minimum artistic intervention, Vikenti Komitski’s works transform everyday-life objects and practices, seeking an instant artistic communication with the viewer. It is as if they are guided by the sudden idea, the momentary switch-over and change of situation, which leads to a different viewpoint.

The artist is among the youngest generation of authors, working in Bulgaria which, having surmounted the waves of emigration and rearrangement of social hierarchies and layers, began working in the fundamentally different cultural circumstances of open borders in an ever more globalizing world. In this world, the social conflicts which enter the immediate Lebensraum of the artist and the viewer have lost their acuteness, and bear no memory of the pathetic-utopian past, neither of the traumatizing nature of the transition. Along with pacifism, defined by Ulrich Beck as an essential feature of the global meta-power, arises also a first and foremost as a world of unification, not of division. In the works of Vikenti Komitski, this precise pacifying aspect of globalization is ironically played with. The world is seen by the author as an ideal, round hyperbole of unity (Together Again, 2009) whose pointedly collaged image raises the issue of the alluring possibility for a new, global utopia. The conflict takes place not in that “meta” space of ideas and political ideologies but in this world here, in the very milieu we inhabit and which comes as a product of the institutional production of different and quite specific educational, cultural and political instruments. This is way the works of the artist depict the object world predominantly damaged, with the objects broken (Broken Book, 2008) or having pieces taken away or added to them (Untitled (Scissors), 2009). The artist’s view, being part of the world here and now, is simultaneously creating it. The series of minimalistic drawings holds a whole universe of views which, though taken off by the image as rejection of their immediate representation, are added by the artist as an ever present possibility. What brings them together into the same space is their existence in time – they too, are now its document and comment. Exhibition # 1 itself becomes a specific time capsule in which the artist’s figure is the one who “carries” the actuality.

 

Vladiya Mihaylova

 

Text form the brochure of the exhibition # 1 Vikenti Komitski, Meeting Point Platform, Vaska Emanouilova Gallery