New Ghostly Paintings /we are now all shadows/

Exhibition
New Ghostly Paintings /we are now all shadows/
VENTSISLAV ZANKOV
7 – 25 June 2011

„Rakursi“ Art Gallery introduces to the wider public the latest large-size paintings of Ventsislav Zankov starting June 7th, 2011. The exhibition will be open through June 25th, 2011.

It’s an inspiration, meant for the 21c. cave walls with their minimalistic hi-tech Italian interior design, suggesting respect, happiness and prosperity.

The workout obsession and the religious passion for bio- and eco-dieting are in fact a repetitive revalidation of the inconvenience we experience through our ‘improper’ bodies. The bodies we desire to have are perfect, that is immaterial. Neglecting our bodies on the other hand suggests perhaps a refusal to acknowledge the material world and our presence in it. Communication has been reduced to a virtual, lonely and body-less experience, allowing you to choose the ideal appearance, and without much effort. This imposed appearance either equals the best ever photo- carnality or the lack of it. At the same time we are branching inside, we grow our wishful, im/possible and un/real ideas about ourselves and our own boundaries. The dumb horror of our empty lives, our frustrated sexuality and spite, rising from the tensions of our day-by-day physical efforts to remain present in the material world, keep hissing through the cracked polished surface of the ideal and its reflection. Survival remains our last priority, with its price rising and its value falling.

New Ghostly Paintings presents the punctured and unarticulated shapes of Homo Sapience in the 21 c. through minimalistic, stylized drawings and with patterns of spontaneity and reserve that go back to the traditions of the Far East. Content-wise the images of the new ghostly paintings are western by default, they are shadows cast over the walls of modern caves, inhabited by us and our hysterical relationships. The new ghostly paintings may be defined as the cave paintings of the inner world of the barbarized, disintegrating human being of the third millennium AD, paintings that shockand captivate viewers with their simplicity, expressiveness and symbol power .

With his latest series of large-scale paintings Ventsislav Zankov achieves a sudden and unbelievable encounter between eastern practices in painting and modern images with expressiveness evoking The Scream of Edward Munch, rushing back to the caves of prehistoric men and tapping on their efforts to grasp and conquer the world in a painting.

 

Ventsislav Zankov graduated Sculpture in the National Academy of Arts, Sofia. He has worked with different types of media – sculpture, painting, drawing and video. Throughout the 1990s he becomes famous with his controversial performances. He is a participant in various international art projects.

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