Martin Penev is an artist whose approach is not confined to a particular media or art. He employs new technologies the same way as he works with sculpture, found or appropriated objects, drawings, or goes beyond visual arts, seeking to experiment with the language of dance, theatre and performance. Beyond the wide diversity of means of expression lays the interest in the concept of a media itself, and its relationship with the images. By intuition, the artist’s ideas draw nearer to the understanding of the image in Hans Belting’s visual anthropology, where the image is comprehended as a self-contained phenomenon and experiences dynamic, constantly changing attitudes toward the media (the mediator) and the body (the mind that perceives it, and its performative bodily retransmission).

The exhibition Exploiting the Erased Image outlines a field of experience which is simultaneously visual, emotional, and conceptual, and where the artist deals with the memories and the personal experience by creating various links between text, image and mediator (media). Each of the works he presents is based on something that actually happened and that was of personal meaning to him. These works, however, are abstracted from the daily flow of short-lived chats and meetings, and are transformed into little events holding the status of “documents” in which real people and situations are absent. The text in the works makes reference to the original event, while the images lead to the phantasmal timelessness of archetypal characters whose fictitiousness is enhanced by the choice of a mediator; in most cases they are placed in a virtual environment. Thus the works are in fact related much less with the event itself, which seems to have been erased, and far more with the image that it has brought into the mind of the perceiver. These are documentary fantasies, which collectively involve the spectator in a world of bizarre, strange, heterogeneous characters who “speak” in a common, daily, “human” language: objects, 3D collages, short animations, images of human bodies with horse heads, gulls, pigeons, deer, cats; talking rhinos and hippos; a gorilla tied to a post, etc. The exhibition is presented as an installation in space: an armchair, a light fixture, a small table and a bedside table with an aspirin blister are part of it. The artist uses them to “direct” certain situations and introduce us to the overall atmosphere of perception. In this context, Martin Penev’s exhibition contains, without being limited to, many elements of cinema and theatre, and it remains a comprehensive “visual production” made up of individual installations and works of art.

The artist works on the images in a way that allows him to exploit their possibilities to create shared, common meanings, beyond the absence and erasure of the real characters in the events, and despite their fantasticality and timelessness. Fantasies bring sense which has value and social merit, it is related to the public here and now – including the outcast groups, the relationships between the generations, the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, the concepts of “good” and faith.

Vladiya Mihaylova