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The world according to Solakov: working in an ever-proliferating range of mediums Bulgarian Nedko Solakov uses fiction, confession and equivocation to navigate a post-Soviet landscape of loose ends. Playfulness, his midcareer survey suggests, is the skeptic's best weapon
Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Sarah McFadden
... [I]t is precisely this masquerade of fictions and ironies and fantastic scenarios that can draw us out and bring us close to ourselves. The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who and what we are or might be
--Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
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Fiction--quite literally, storytelling--is at the heart of Nedko Solakov's art. The artist's midcareer survey brings together an assortment of materially formally heterogeneous works--the masquerades and fantastic scenarios of his many-faceted, profoundly entertaining conceptual practice--which since 1990 have been presented mostly one at a time in a slew of international biennials and in other group and solo shows in the U.S., Europe, Asia and South America. Jointly organized by the Rooseum (Malmo, Sweden), Casino Luxembourg and O.K. Centrum (Linz. Austria), "Nedko Solakov: A 12 1/3 (and even more) Year Survey" opened in Luxembourg, where some 35 pieces fanned out to fill the Casino's exhibition space, as well a portion of its vaulted brick basement. Physically, the works ranged from a single statement written on the ceiling to the nearly operatic This Me, Too ... (1996), a sprawling, multifarious, 3-D extravaganza that threatens to swamp its nominal subject. (That is part of the intended effect.) In all, there were nine room-size installations; a couple of deliberately unfinished monochrome wall paintings; several extended series of delicately rendered figurative drawings, most incorporating inscriptions; handmade books; diverse small objects; performance videos and DVDs; large-scale color photographs; an interactive CD-ROM; and, from the 1980s, a constellation of works--small paintings, altered found objects and images and a large collage of souvenirs from a month's stay in West Germany in 1988--many of which have not been shown previously outside Bulgaria, where the artist was born in 1957 and still lives.
It's probable that Solakov's prolonged experience of political absolutism went into his becoming a champion of ambiguity and loose ends. No doubt to his delight, it is neither totally true nor completely false to say that the present show tracks his progress from academically trained mural painter engaged in the struggle for artistic freedom in Bulgaria to the successful, globetrotting postmodernist he is today. True, all the ingredients of such a story are assembled, but with the exception of the Soviet-era works, their arrangement is a-chronological. Thus his artistic evolution is "available," but only as one discontinuous subtext among myriad others.
Still, connecting the dots has its rewards, and in this regard the "(and even more)" group of pre-1992 works was most valuable. Disappointingly, Solakov's so-called "subversive" paintings, some of which made it into the state-sponsored, juried "All-Bulgarian" annuals, were not presented. (1) This lack was partly compensated for by the inclusion of individual components of The Bathtub, the artist's first fully realized installation, which was exhibited in a watershed group show in Sofia in 1988. (2) Made in 1986, the selected objects are bits of altered domestic bric-a-brac that attest to Solakov's already evident proclivity for undermining order--in this case, pictorial. In one of the items, called Vampire, a leering black bloblike figure, precursor to a type that still crops up in Solakov's works, has been painted into the background of a black-and-white mass-market print showing a bare-breasted, female Narcissus bending over a pool of water. The lecherous looking intruder transforms the kitsch-romantic portrayal into a batty variant of Susannah and the Elders. In Hunting, a traditional hunting scene printed on a serving tray is given a surrealistic twist by the artist's addition of a reptilian blob squirming helplessly in the path of its pursuers. You can't help feeling sorry for the wretched thing.
Solakov's art still nurtures a soft spot for the downtrodden, the unlucky and the woeful, and its obvious sympathies have expanded to encompass the merely fearful and fallible, which is to say, people like himself. But back to 1986: Solakov was already using art to interrupt order, to interfere with meaning and upset expectations. The serving tray, in all its modesty, carries a heavy allegorical load.
Two key transitional pieces made directly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 have the force of a declaration of independence and foreshadow the cathartic, critical and prodigiously inventive admixtures of words, images and objects to be found in the subsequent mature work, which is the subject of the exhibition's main 12 1/3-year time frame. Top Secret (1989-90), the earlier of the two, is a small, two-drawer card catalogue in which Solakov divulged in writing and drawing "everything shameful and depressing" (3) that he wanted to get off his chest. An avowedly confessional work, it details most notably his seven-year stint, begun at age 19, as an unpaid informer for the Bulgarian secret police. He ended that collaboration in 1983, before perestroika was even a glimmer on the Soviet horizon, but remained haunted by the experience. Though he was not threatened with involuntary exposure of the kind to which his counterparts in other post-Communist countries were subjected, (4) Solakov believed that in order to proceed honestly as an artist he needed to declare his past. His use of art as a vehicle for self-disclosure has been called "unique in the context of post-Communist Europe," and in this regard Top Secret still stands alone. (5)
