EN PASSAN

01.09 -30.09.2015
NATIONAL AUTUMN EXHIBITIONS,
Old Plovdiv
Balabanov House, Florence (Italy)

Irina Georgieva, drawing – Arched Hall
Kiril Cholakov, drawing and sculpture – Deep Hall
Trepka Petkova, painting – Courtyard

En passant

The history of chess (much like the history of art) insists on its own antiquity, unfolding the mythical narrative of its origin toward times immemorial. At the same time, the system of rules and the embedded figures and ideas have a rather shortened historical path. The rules and principles of modern chess emerged only around the dawn of the Modern Age and reflect the dynamics of this threshold—its communicative and media structures, the triumph of the abstract and the relative, of thinking in aporias and virtual alternatives — processes that also define the beginnings of art history.The notion of en passant — the rule allowing the capture of a pawn in the act of passing through a square, but only on the immediately following move — materializes abstractions like path, direction, and goal, while at the same time leading them into another reality. A reality which, despite its clear dimensions, contemplates ideas like the shadow of the other. Even more — this rule draws into the game not only the shadow of the passing piece, but also the shadow of the passage itself.

From a historical perspective, it is no coincidence that en passant is one of the newest rules in chess. It bears the marks of mutual intensification and heightened transfer in which all (contemporary) communication occurs: the barely perceptible traces of a state of exception, of the moment’s intensified significance, of the dominance of movement over stillness, of situation over status quo, of process over goal, of metamorphosis over the fossil. All this demands a new visual force—the ability to materialize virtual (potential) fields of activity, to develop the perceptions of an art of transition.

This art of transition creates shared layers of sensory attitude between chess and visual imagery. Like the contemporary image-creators, their viewers also place creative communication within the unstable but vast domain called “in passing” — a territory of the unfixed, the flickering and the fading, of alternating between sudden alertness and immersion in monotony, of suggestion that has withdrawn from unidirectional causal relationships. Thus, the creation and understanding of art unfold between pre-articulated impulse sand the threads of remembrance, and the game begins not where A and B meet to determine who will corner and defeat the other, but where they meet to create something third in the act of play—something greater than both A and B.

I. Created in Transition
En passant is a concept for how an artwork is conceived and realized through the interaction between object and subject; how the work occurs in the fragile and fleeting territory of passage and lasts within its boundaries; how it appears as a direct product of the gaze and the situation, of the endless game of pre-receptive articulations and momentarily fixed concretizations. En passant is not only a way to think of the potentially possible as truly present and real, but also to build upon its future possible projections and reflections— to trace its story in miniature. In this way, the individuality of the observer (the subject) overcomes its singularity and dissolves its contours into the flow of a passing object-multiplicity—the self colonizes space and is transposed, acquiring the figure and optics of the other in the fabric of passing visual images.

II. Beyond Contemplation
What occurs in passing within the observer’s perception negates contemplation as the classical school of alternative behavior for the modern person. The wandering individual paves with their transitions the path of classical modernity of a decadent (contemplative) type in the image of the dilettante — the wanderer striving for self-improvement, simultaneously an object and subject of art, a walking artwork, author and artist of their own life.
The newest age further dynamizes the model created by the artistic potential of this type by excluding the aesthetic as the dominant force. In the en passant concept, the singularity of former contemplation dissolves, and multiple potential contemplations pulse in different directions, freed from the appeals of the aesthetic, departing from the old spirit of place in favor of saturating and occupying transient fields — to create portable, communicatively active spaces of vision.

III. Avant-garde Beyond the Avant-garde
En passant is also a perceptual matrix that raises the question of the avant- garde’s fate. When, after a long march, an army’s vanguard advances too far ahead, it becomes vulnerable — easily surrounded on the flanks or even destroyed (or assimilated) by opponents. Thus, the units that moved too far cease to be the vanguard, while their opponents are nourished by theprerogatives of the avant-garde.

In these intermediate (shared) border zones, new worlds emerge suddenly. Although they exist only in the imaginary clash of ideas, lines, and intentions — in the abstract relativity of passage, of the intertwining of trajectories and contours, in combinatorial rather than aesthetic completeness — these worlds nonetheless insist on beauty in their own way. The beauty en passant lies in this: that humanity will always dream of being both here and somewhere else at the same time, both alone and with everyone else, always setting off —though knowing it will never be able to fully leave itself behind (once and for all).
Curator: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Galina Lardeva