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

As Sokalov's career moved into high gear during the '90s, he increasingly mocked his own ambition and success (an effective strategy which led to further success and perhaps higher ambition) and poked fun at the system that supported and promoted them. An outsider on the inside, so to speak, he quickly learned the ropes of the Western art world while staying in touch with who he is and what he hopes to achieve. Both are quite complex.

As a performer, Solakov has a gift for buffoonery. Some of My Capabilities, a 1 1/2-minute silent film loop from 1995, features the artist touching his tongue to his nose, crossing his eyes, wiggling his ears, flicking his tongue in and out while blinking his eyes at a frenetic rate, bending his double-jointed thumb, executing penile gymnastics and making a small line drawing, etc. The film trails off with the words "and so on and so forth," leading us to fantasize about the rest of his repertory of spectacularly goofy antics, which everyone understands but few can imitate. Solakov uses them as a bridge to his audience, whom he often addresses in his written works as "dear viewer," or just plain "you."

His art can be irresistibly humble and engaging. The show contains examples of the ways he treats interior walls, mirror frames, large photographs and even airplane wings (8) as message boards and doodle pads. Generally tiny, the notations tend literally to be one with their supports. The caption below a pin hole in one of the Casino's walls read "a hole with a little mouse in it"; nearby a small paint blister was labeled "a little problem is hidden here"; a small oval-shaped bump outlined in ink mutated into "a fussy wet baby." Floral wallpaper patterns and details of photographs provide armatures and grounds for the whimsical antics of stick figures endowed with human drives and capacities for thought, speech, emotion and so on. Once you spot them, an achievement that sometimes requires getting down on hands and knees or craning your neck while standing on tiptoe, it's like gazing through a zoom lens into another order of reality: what appeared to be mute planes and surfaces teem with life. Kids' stuff again: exhibition as treasure hunt, "bare" walls and occasionally the view out the window as focuses of attention.

The show ricochets between the antimonumental, chatty sublime and the self-mockingly grandiose. Solakov might have been thinking of Van Dyck when he came up with the idea for The New Ones, a 1996 installation featuring five gold-framed oil portraits of members of Bulgaria's new rich, plus 18 preparatory drawings hung on walls painted English red. But whereas Van Dyck was paid royally by his wealthy patrons, Solakov painted his likenesses for free, feeling duly compensated by the promise of immortality that went with the job, or so the gambit went. It was the subjects who served the artist by agreeing to sit for him.

Over the past several years, Solakov's art has taken increasingly attenuated material form, with projects ranging from an attempt to negotiate a Middle East cease-fire that would have coincided with a show he had last year in Israel (9) to diverting funds allocated for a Brussels exhibition (10) to pay for ads for the present survey in last October's issues of Frieze and Artforum. His most recent installation, El Bulgaro, dates from 2000. It is in many respects the culminating point thus far of his narrative work in three dimensions. In it he fashions for himself a mock-heroic lineage that includes El Greco, upon whom he bestows a Bulgarian grandmother, and the great satirist Cervantes, who was El Greco's contemporary. The piece telescopes time, travesties the jealously guarded secretiveness that attends scholarly discoveries, nods at the creativity of unscrupulous art merchants and forgers (fiction-producers like Solakov), includes apocryphal texts that parody the terminology of art historians and psychoanalysts, and features a fetching photographic portrait of the burly artist striking a quintessentially self-important pose while wearing a pair of frilly bloomers, presumably typical attire for a 17th-century male painter working in Toledo. The bloomers too are exhibited, as if to lend credibility to a story in which they have no particular significance.