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

The rest of the objects in the piece are conventionally aligned paintings, prints and drawings said to be copies of works attributed to El Greco's newly revealed alter ego and esthetic counterforce, El Bulgaro. The copies are signed by Solakov, who, like El Greco/El Bulgaro, is an itinerant artist formed in the East and come to prominence in the West. Ingeniously contrived, intricately woven and cleverly amusing connections such as this point to the penetrating exactness of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's observation at the end of her catalogue essay: "It is as if Nedko were whispering ... 'What else can a sensitive artist (male, white, European and with a rather 'hulky' physique) do right now but play out his megalomaniac, deep impulses ironically, achieving and denying at once his will to power?'"

Sprinkled among the writings on the walls, the artist's own brief editorial and critical comments--"sorry for the English," "mistake," "failed piece"--speak to what he calls his immediate reaction of assessment and underscore the performative, improvised nature of much of his art. In Luxembourg one of these notations, slightly longer than the rest, was proffered as an independent work (more were intended but time ran out) that was initially planned to assess parts or all of the show. Written in the first person at the last minute (the piece is marked with the time and date), it states that, having just finished installing the works, Solakov lacks critical distance and has to hurry to take a shower before the opening. You can't be sure whether or how much posturing is involved here or in other of his spontaneous-seeming, confessional works, but the effect is a little like that of "Well-Known Stories": a tad indelicate (how bad does he smell and do we really want to know?) and endearing for all that (the star of the hour gets sweaty and brain-tired just like the rest of us).

"The Pretentious Retrospective," the tongue-in-cheek title of the series inaugurated by the piece just mentioned, is appropriately inappropriate to this generous yet incomplete survey, from which Solakov's best-known and arguably most cogent work, A Life (Black & White), 1999-2001, is conspicuously missing. Labor- and material-intensive, it is an emblematic postmodern performance piece that calls for two hired hands to repaint the walls of an exhibition space continuously for the duration of the show. One painter uses white paint, the other black, and they advance in the same direction, covering one another's work as they go. The piece is finished when the show ends.

Omitted because of its familiarity and high cost, A Life is nevertheless not forgotten. (11) It is pictured prominently on the catalogue's wraparound cover and features in its pages, where the full retrospective is staged in print. No doubt to the artist's delight, the book is perplexing. To assure that it retains its indecisive, nondefinitive, unruly character, the artist determined the order in which the works would appear in its pages by drawing their titles blindly from a proverbial hat. Actually it was a teacup.