Within the context of “Meeting point”, Nikolay Zanev’s project raises numerous questions of major importance treating the relationship between critique, audience, artist and artefact. The artist makes the art object and the critique dependent by critically exposing texts in the gallery space, offering free interpretations of them. His methods include appropriations of already existing objects, photography, pictures and manipulated objects.

The critical text often sets off to explore different possible relations and meanings of the work. Using foreign borrowings and too complex metaphors and abstract descriptions it exposes the artistic work to the risk of distortion, oversaturation and overcharging. The impressive phrases and complex metaphors provide the artist with specific material. He takes solely the literal meaning of them and thus removes in a surgical manner the connotation of the epithets in the description. The result is a sequence of graphic, generalized pictures, similar to the explicatory symbols on commercial product packages. Thus, N. Zanev reduces the image to a semiotic sign, eliminates the effectiveness of the description and hurls it to the bottom of its impact ability.

Despite the fact that the exhibition employs simple means and without being pompously ambitious, it raises a huge number of questions in numerous directions: form the frequently discussed public space to the pitiable state of the critique torn between its function of art and a formative modulator in the contemporary artistic reality.

Vera Mlechevska