Vaska Emanuilova gallery, Sofia 20.10 – 29.10 

2017

The exhibition of the works by Radostin Sedevchev enters an insufficiently explored territory of art in Bulgaria. It is the artistic work with documents and the comprehending of documents’ connection to the past and to the possible new viewpoints in the present. The exhibited works have been created in the course of the past one year and provide a new perspective on the attitudes toward memory and present-day relevance.  

Anything may be perceived as a document by the artist: any casual object, any note may become a basis from which a certain narrative or story can be developed. Thus the exhibited works are based on objects, images, texts and other “things” found at the flea market or thrown away, which people regard as useless: old photographs and postcards, a birth certificate, an on tick notebook, etc. The artist re-paints, enhances, colours, composes, frames these needed-by-nobody remnants, thereby making them not simply works of art but anonymous micro stories of different people’s lives.  

These would be unknown people, engaged in various trivial everyday activities, which Radostin Sedevchev reveals to the audience as seen through his own eyes. The major story and the important, common-scale re-reading of the past is absent from the exhibition. Instead, the artist engages in the the continuous scrutiny of the minor and insignificant, which everyone can understand and interpret on their own. 

As he asserts a certain direction and style of work in his first solo exhibition, the artist also sends out a message of an ethical aspect. It is not a statement, it does not have an ideological or edifying connotation, but is related to the simple gesture of looking back to the past in a human dimension.

curator: Vladiya Mihaylova