Vitto Valentinov

“Areas of Stability” was part of my solo exhibition “The Behavior of Matter” at KO-OP Gallery.

MATTER AND TOUCH
This exhibition comes as a result of a need for a stronger connection to the physical. For months, I carefully collected small objects from the streets I walked, from my kitchen, among my son's toys, from flea markets and hardware stores. I collected objects that attracted me by their physical presence. There is a pleasurable sense of touch when I hold them in my hands, and am in touch with their weight or lightness, their rough or smooth surface, temperature, density or transparency. The experience of the real, here and now, as opposed to the virtual, the digital, the simulated. Our growing online presence, precipitated by the Covid-19 crisis, has further intensified my need for physical communication.

SYSTEMS AS SITUATIONS
In this exhibition I work with found objects that become elements of systems. I consider systems as situations. Elements are never autonomous units, they are always in relationships, in states of dialogue, contact, conflict, opposition, repulsion or attraction. My aim was to create unusual relationships between these found pieces of matter. These relationships between them are the works themselves - often in empty space as well as in the mind of the viewer. There are no narratives in this exhibition - there are situations and scenes. The dramaturgy here is in the action, not the story.

FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE
In recent years, I have been creating installations with audience participation, through which I have been building conditions for communication. Each installation was a new type of unusual expressive means of communication between the participants. I am interested in language as a system for transferring information from one form to another. In this exhibition, I reflect in the context of encoding information into a new language. Every material - because of its shape, surface or size, is like a letter in an alphabet. The combinations, repetitions and spacing between them shape the words, punctuation marks and pauses in a sentence.

DEBRIS
In this exhibition, many of the building blocks are pieces of material that are often broken parts of larger things. I try to create new stable configurations out of this increasingly desolate and fragmented world by connecting the parts and giving them different meaning and significance. These fragments are no longer lonely and abandoned, but part of new relationships and dialogues.

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The project is realized with the support of the National Culture Fund.