Chimera: The Life and Work of Svetoslav S.

Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales 2023. Museo de Arte Costarricense, San José, CR.

The instalation consists of creating the story of Svetoslav S., a fictional painter whose life and work explore the role of art history in the interplay between politics, identity, and the indiscriminate use of images.

Svetoslav S. is the fictional character I have crafted to experiment with the physical and digital manipulation of images. This character holds a quality akin to a Trojan horse, allowing me to pose questions that I do not feel authorized to ask in factual cases due to ethical reasons. This dilemma is crucial and prompts questions such as when can I manipulate images and what kind of images am I authorized to modify? What rights does an artist have to use a particular image? And how can I use these images within a framework of respect and reflection, rather than just as artistic material?

In response to these questions, I position my work as expanded painting or expanded pictorial space. This means that I see painting as a space of conflict where not only two-dimensional pictorial images reside but also objects, texts, and other types of paraphernalia. This notion offers particular qualities that enable me to problematize issues related to political imaginaries, narrative construction, identities, and temporalities. As such, expanded painting possesses a flexible condition: painting is promiscuous. The same could be said of photographs, which circulate incessantly and endlessly every day in an ever faster manner. However, the quality of painting to "puncture/tear" my emotional response is different—this is a highly debated argument; therefore, I understand this as my personal experience and opinion—the resistance I obtain from the material aspect of a painting is what, I affirm, makes most of this difference.

I am interested in the "elastic" qualities of painting. On the one hand, painting is confined to a spatial limit—in two or three dimensions—and its limitation lies in its complex relationship with representation, as it can represent certain ideas on surfaces, even if they are not the actual ideas. On the other hand, painting has been used to comment on a wide variety of topics throughout history. The extended notion of painting that I employ thus takes advantage of specific elements of the pictorial medium as well as qualities of other mediums to create particular environments, or as I call them: scenarios.

To create these scenarios, I appropriate the concept of "re-mediatization" from the German theorist Isabelle Graw to problematize the role and status of painting today. Graw borrows this notion from the essay by art historian Ilka Becker, 'The Image as Revenant: Retroactivity and Remediation in the Works of [artist] T. J. Wilcox,' in which she defines re-mediatization (or re-mediation) as "[the] process [that] occurs when characteristics that have been attributed to one medium are taken up by another."

Thus, the installation for the Salon 2023 is a fictional construction with real elements. It presents a narrative of the life and work of a fictional artist through images (photos, paintings, newspaper clippings), and other objects collected from different sources and places. The installation seeks to adopt a museum aesthetic, using tables and display cases with explanatory and historical texts to present a fictional narrative that reuses recurring tropes in art history.

The fictional artist Svetoslav S. originates from a real name I observed in a news report on a German television channel. The character's life was created from a script constructed using a series of images provided to Tatiana Monge, who developed a short text based on these images and some characteristics I supplied, such as the character's religious beliefs, political activism, the era in which they lived, their artistic sensitivity, and the geographical area in which they lived.

SCROLL DOWN FOR IMAGES