FALSE MOVEMENT

“False Movement”, before being the title of this exhibition, was the title of a  famous film by Wim Wenders, inspired by Wolfgang Goethe’s novel “Wilhem  Meister’s Apprenticeship”, written in the late 18th century. The theme of the  film and the book is that of overcoming the artist’s loneliness.

The artist expresses himself, seeking and discovering himself, but is never  satisfied. His search has no conclusion, his own subjectivity is also always  put to the test by the judgment of others, the public, and most probably that of  the critics as well. And this movement is never really one that’s going forward,  it is often one of going backward in one’s own history, in the nostalgia for  something far away in time, in the happiness of finding something that one  thought was lost. A FALSE MOVEMENT. 

Two souls coexist in the world of KIRIL CHOLAKOV – the one of storytelling,  of the word that travels through time, and the one of memory, that prevents  movement, that binds the artist to a fixed point, to an origin. 

The works on display tell the story of the man who adopts a stork and makes  it into a simple and respected Bulgarian villager. It contains the elements of a  world that has not disappeared entirely, because art tells its story and  transmits it, in order for it to be reborn. A surreal and cruel story, in which the  stork, when attempting to return to its fellows for the following migration, is  killed: it has betrayed the group and has been punished for it. 

The artist has also left the group. Kiril manages to create his own poetic  universe, made up of micro events, drawn from literature, from his own  personal history. He is tied to his “coming-of-age novel” in search of the truth  that is hidden, to a wandering and a journey, without ever moving. “Every  departure is also a return,” the artist wrote. And before everything disappears  – men, countries, trees and animals, Kiril tries to retain, through his work,  these symbols that continue to pulsate in his veins. 

THE POETICISM OF HIS UNIVERSE HAS SOMETHING STILL AND  ABSOLUTE ABOUT IT. 

Everything becomes writing – words that narrate and build images. The  extraordinary technique with which phrases, whole texts, become textures of  images, accompanies with a welcoming black and white the wonderous  dimension of art, art transforming into a writer, and the writer – into an artist, a  duality, which itself is in search of unitry: as well as in search of an escape  from that solitude – a solitude, which is necessary in order to write or paint. 

Within his shadow theater ghosts and ancestral figures appear, from which he  has learned during his youth in Bulgaria, but always with a light tone, never  grim or ironic. The spiraling flight of the storks indicates the direction, the  connection between the earthly and the celestial, the eternal return of the  rejected, the freedom of the birds to point us, humans, to a possible  liberation.  Texts from the catalog edited by exhibition curator Valerio Dehò.