Starting point in Milen Miltchev's work is always a unique light situation, which leads to a personal sensation when picked up and reflected on. Depending on the vision that arises Miltchev uses different tools, materials, and media to express himself pictorially and sensually.
Most of the time the source is a photograph in a certain light situation, which freezes an emotion, a sensation or mood. This image is then decomposed into single light layers and respectively dissolves and transforms into another material. For instance when using lacquer paint, the artist uses many layers of paint evenly applied onto the surface and consequently cut up afterwards with a grinding method. By doing so he reduces the images to their contour lines and levels of brightness. Through this process he achieves steadily changing reflections of the environment and light on the surface of the photographs. What remains is a totally different image that stimulates a different perception through its beautiful illusion.
Milen Miltchev's sculptures are made of plexiglas, sheet metal and polyester, materials that enable to absorb the changes of light and space. They appear optically like a distant imagination, in its transparency like water that gets broken up in the light under the wind. These sculptures appear like their materiality is in motion as reflected by the beholder and become weightless on wall and floor and get carried through the most subtle light of shadow. It's like and optical silent breathing reflection, accompanied by dark lines of black acrylic showing its contours. And finally the sculptures are abstract in its material irreality and concrete in its relation to a familiar ambience - windows, frame pictures or mirrors, a water basin, a shower curtain. The silence of the optical material distortion and the sound of a tender emotion sum up a paradox. They are pictures and sculptures at the same time.
The works in this exhibition reflect the European light but also the very different Australian light in which the artist created some of his works and which leaves the artist and the viewer perceive different emotions.
MARY LOU PAVLOVIC [Australia]
Mary Lou Pavlovic's work has the sense of a deep lingering violence, often made presentable or palatable by slick, beautiful surfaces. Issues of taste and acceptability predominate.
Pavlovic works across a number of mediums including photography, video and sculpture. Through these diverse working methods, she articulates her social and political beliefs, communicating forceful and often confronting messages about violence and power. Her exquisite objects such as toy guns with their surfaces encrusted in glitter, are disturbingly seductive. The threat implicit in the objects is hidden behind a glamorous veneer.
The sculptures of the Melbourne based artist are based on the objects she takes from the 'low end' of culture and pretties them up. This is the case with her work 'Vacuous Wheelchair' where a wheelchair is covered in red glass and made 'pretty' and crutches, that are stuck in concrete. The latter work refers to women's lib that somehow seems to be stuck in places missing out on original intentions and goals.
Mary Lou Pavlovic graduated at the Goldsmith College of Arts in London and has been included in important group exhibitions in Australia and overseas. She has also held solo exhibitions in Australia, Germany and Great Britain.
