Idioms
"Idioms" is the second solo exhibition of the visual artist Filip Velkovski (1988, Skopje). In this new project, Velkovski continues his research in painting, through a series of 9 paintings, larger format in mix media technique, mostly oil, painted between 2017-2020, under the working title "Messages on Tungsten”.
Contemporary culture is defined by new technologies and the networked experience of the visual. But despite the specific digital systems and information carriers, the image phenomenon, the different ways of image making and the motives behind it remain a big enigma. In the age of the "pictorial and bio cybernetic turn", when humans do not have an exclusive position in creating images, we are still obsessed with them, regardless of their genesis.
Unlike his first project "Liminal Figures" (2017, YKC-Skopje), where the primary subject in his pictorial research is the figure, in the cycle "Idioms" he focused on color, the intersection between texture, the hidden textual and visual messages, which are revealed below the surface of the scratched and peeled layers of dense paint.
Images thus form a palimpsest structure, which is a metaphorical representation of the complex functioning of the human mind, of the amorphousness and fluidity of thoughts at some presumed stage before the crystallization of ideas.
By distorting the figurative elements into strange, composite structures, as well as by the short elliptical titles, a gap is created in the possibility of explicitly revealing the narrative. The space between the pictorial and the textual is occupied by abstract forms that are a simulation of text, and oscillate in morphing, back and forth.
The animation that is projected on canvas and represents a kind of punctum in the whole, a perceptual crossroad, functions in a similar way: it belongs to it at the same time, but it is also an anomaly. Deviating from the static, it also reveals the potential of the other pictures.
The viewer is confronted with a kind of open work: the space that the artist conceivers as a reconstruction of a "cell of mental maps", connects the individual images together with the directed light and the subtle sound, into a symbiotic whole.
