Structura Open Windows #3: Vitto Valentinov
20.12.2022 - 31.12.2022
CONVERSION, 2022
Vitto Valentinov is an artist who is interested in the object and its transformation due to changes that have occurred under the influence of the passage of time or different functions. He often resurrects objects that are no longer useful, but also creates new ones that only resemble everyday life and challenge us to imagine journeys into other worlds. With them he builds situations based on relationships between shapes, lines and colours.
About his new work at Structura Gallery, Vitto Valentinov says: “Conversion” resembles an architectural construction of a facility with an unclear function. The structure is divided into three parts – high, medium and low. The middle level resembles a production department of an industrial building. This part is like a system in which mechanical processes – a kind of material activity – take place. The upper level is represented by upward tapering forms, slightly elevated above the other elements. In this part, something like a sacred stone stands aloft. Here the connection is with the sacred, the sky, the air, even the cosmos. In the lower level are amorphous shapes that look like puddles or leaks with waste material. The symbolic connection is with the dead, the old, the spent, the superfluous and the useless.”
The sculpture has an abstract character and the analogies listed are not easily discernible. The levels are also not categorically separated but are woven into one another. In this achromatic miniature space, time flows at a particular pace. Some parts of the constructions give a sense of stillness and stasis, others seem to be harnessed to activity and processes are taking place within them. These half-permanent-half-functioning structures inhabit a territory between the new and the old, between the dead and the living, between the eternal and the transitory.
The project is realized with the financial support of the National Culture Fund under the Creative Fellowships Programme.