Boredom is the Root of All Evil

7 Apr-16 Apr 2023

PV 6 Apr 2023, 6-8pm

Overview

Dovetail is a nomadic curatorial project bringing both international and UK-based
emerging artists together to create a site-specific installation focusing on the
architectural terraformation of the traditional gallery space into a new sculptural plane
on which to dictate interactions between artworks via an environmental sculptural
ground. 'Boredom is the Root of all Evil' is Dovetail's upcoming collaborative exhibition
bringing together the work of sculptor Manuel Cornelius and painter Stefania Batoeva
taking place at the Art in Perpetuity trust in London.

Both artists share a special ability to draw out the space between an emerging narrative
with specialised objects. This exhibition has been designed to take this raw potential and
create a space that is built up purely of that potential, stretching out the process of
becoming into spatial tangibility. Despite working across very different mediums, both
artists share an unusual sense of narrative construction, drawing from the remnants of
everyday life to devise otherwise unforeseen combinations through a free play of
imagination, spontaneity and abstraction.

Stefania Batoeva’s works, which are all compositionally different from one another, have
a perplexing unifying quality that ties them together. The aura they emanate explores
the limits of knowing and reaches into the zones of uncertainty and codependency
between the physical and the imaginary. In many of her works, there are overriding,
heavy lines spanning from the background to the foreground, which seems to depict
simultaneous events and emotion evoked through the figurative postures that recline,
reach, and slouch throughout her layered fields. Batoeva’s works are multi-faceted and
contain many layers (both literal through the brushstrokes and layering of frames and
metaphorical through the feelings they evoke). Through her unusual narrative
construction, Batoeva is able to connect herself, her work, and the viewer through an
attractive mutual desire for understanding.

Manuel Cornelius’ sculptures deal with the language of objects. In the spirit of semiotics,
he assumes that the perceptible exterior of things contains a code that can be
deciphered and read. In his works, he examines how this code is constructed,
communicated, and sometimes takes on a life of its own. He is particularly interested in
the crossover point at which the product’s language can no longer be reliably
deciphered, but the objects still have an affecting echo of their familiar origins.

For this exhibition Cornelius will present a new series of works primarily composed of
elastic materials and agar jelly, a perishable boiled algae extract which allows non-human
forces such as natural phenomena and organisms to be incorporated into the sculptural
process. The ephemerality of these works executed in an organic material result in
objects that have left their sterile, formal shelter and have been transferred to a state of
fragility and decay producing forms that strive away from fulfilling their role.