top of page
Written something very long-long about ROOT, by Ionko Ivan - concept creator and curator of the project about MEGA paintings of Yona Tukuser."Foundation for image synthesis" presents curatorial project "ROOT" by Ionko Ivan and pictorial art works by Yona Tukuser. Curatorial concept involves the challenge of use new forms while presenting the classical expressionism of Yona Tukuser, revealing her difficult childhood in the past, conjoined with a new extravagant environment. The exhibition ROOT therefore introduce elements of modernity, such as video, cars, business relationships, money, fashion, conceptual ways of thinking and media. This project is experimental, meaning that it connects business as the constituent of art.
ROOT WORTH $ 1, 000 000
This is the declared price for the project unveiling:
1. A story about difficult life in the village during childhood of Yona before she emigrates.The project focuses on:
2. Semantics of exhibition ROOT.And that is:a) a message to the people to return to the mother nature and to keep their kind;b) to make people look at a still life art from a different angle;c) to think about displacement of value system from the past, which was tiding us to nature.
3. Recipe for the change in the worldview of the artist, with a purpose to survive in the modern world.
4. Use of suitable modern style technique while presenting the concept of pictorial art at the exhibition, creating ROOT.
5. Power of the Earth to be encoded in the etude - or to descry painting as a spiritual documentary camera.
6. ROOT for $ 1,000,000?
-Yes! This is the actual price for the package of intellectual speculation, which includes:
1) a business as the constituent of art;
2) artist-curator - business relationships;
3) The shining dream in the eyes of the young artist - a reflection of contemporaneity;
7. Vanguard presentation of classical pictorial art. This is a curatorial idea that turns into a paragraph "8."
8. The artist, who does not paint, being metamorphosed as a fraudster because it is "9."
9. The picture that is being developed under the curatorial work of the Ionko Ivan can be called "Doing nothing".
You would say that too much is being theorized just only about some paintings that seem quite expensive if you weigh them on scales. The Pound worth ...! And it gets confusing. But it is just at first sight. If you continue to read the long curatorial essay, you would learn more about what the artist wants to reveal.
"CHILDHOOD".
director: YONA TUKUSER
made: 1994/2010/2017
USSR | BIRTH CERTIFICATE
1. The exhibition ROOT for Yona is psychotherapy. If a psychologist makes his patients to describe their suffering, and liven up their grief on a piece of paper, then Yona as an artist is using the same method, but instead of writing, she is expressing herself through her ability to paint, or to cut long short, reliving memories on canvas. This is her confession of pain she suffered in the village. That's what excites her today, came to the big city, immigrated to another country and faces the rhythm of the modern society. Then she has to get into the whirlwind of this life. Otherwise, she will have to go back to live in the village, cultivating and digging the soil of the God to subsist. But this is something that will be very hard for her. In order not to get there and to be able to survive in the new environment, she must comply with the rules of the city, the rules of the new life. For her this is a kind of a rebirth. She builds a new image for herself. Transforms as chrysalis of silkworms.
From a caterpillar develops into a butterfly and flies away to die. But first she has to follow the rules of the city life. The new social status that she has, requires to free herself from what she had at the time. Only five years ago Yona left the village. She had to learn many things. Throwing galoshes and getting on heels. From excavated and muddy streets of the village - she comes to skip holes in paved streets of the city of Sofia.Before leaving home, Yona learned to bake bread and make cheese. She has learned this to be able to impress her future boyfriend with her culinary skills, whom she will meet in Sofia. This way seizing him, so he becomes her husband. It is a naive, but really touching idea to win someone's heart and to marry him. With this ability to make cheese from milk, in her maiden mind a value system is being born, which was then very quickly incinerated. Being so naive seems very funny now, but until recently it was something very important and serious for her. Yona thought it was necessary to learn these skills when she was coming to Bulgaria.
She knew that most Bulgarians love cheese, and a good housewife, in her opinion, is being assessed by whether she can make cheese or not. It turned out, however, that ... today making cheese is something that is not a current coin. Right away after she comes out of the bus and starts walking along the yellow paved streets of Sofia, she didn't see anyone asking her to make cheese, and that what she has learned in the village has no value in the city. Then, she decides to find a new trick, she will impress the men with. Maybe with her paintings?
This project ROOT is Yona's confession, some kind of psychotherapy-exhibition. Many things weighed on her soul, more continue to weigh on. It is now the time she purifies with this exhibition. Disburdens from the psychological baggage of the past, which weighs on her in the modern society. With the help of these paintings, she casts away all the accumulated negative energy. There are just positive emotions that are left on the surface of her soul. Those that are begotten by the positive moments from the life in the village, observing and estimating the beauty of mother nature and the beauty of the Earth. Besides the heavy emotions that are buried under the brushstrokes of impasto and cabinet paintings, the signs of the artist are being seen on the surface, expressing moments of beautiful experiences that she had. Finally, the grief is removed with the veil of light. Severe experiences remain invisible to the viewer. They lie, buried somewhere deep in the initial layer of her multi-layered expressive painting. She uses a positive color in final phases of creating the painting. Canvases are filled with contrast. Controversies in the painting are the clear and breezy tones of bright colors, made with a bold stroke of a brush on those minor scales, which identify the worst features of our everyday life. There are beauty and spirituality in her still life art, which are born from the touch with nature. We can easily see how she intercommunicated with birds and animals on the mental level, melted in the sunset, woke up early in the morning before the sunrise and washed her face with dew from the roses ... It stands even kitschy at first sight, but all intertwined with facts and brutal heavy dark brushstrokes of paint on the canvas, it is explained away.
"Stool"/ Size: 90x120cm / oil, canvas
YONA TUKUSER / 2012
2.1.The Earth has an energy. When people walk barefoot in the countryside, they are charging with the positive energy, while the Earth is taking away all the negative emotions.Individual is stepping into the chain of nature, where an interchange of free electrons is in its action. This circulation of positive and negative ions has given Yona strength and beauty. Now when we look at her paintings, we understand the social message she wants to send to the viewer. It isa story about the girl, who has lived out a sorrow of the village, coming to the city, and understood how much melancholy is accumulated in her. Yet, she still finds strength to ask the audience to return somehow to nature. Recalls the forgotten truth that we are still only men on this land. Doesn't matter how hard we are being bound to the modern technologies, ideas, high-minded philosophies, still a moment will come when we will all be back to the earth. Dying, we will be buried in the soil of the planet. The truth of the eternal live cycle of every substance in nature that people do forget while living in the city. This is what she is trying to put in remembrance with ROOT and this is the meaning of her exhibition.
"CHILDHOOD".
director: YONA TUKUSER
made: 1994 - 2012
2.2. There is a video included in the exhibition. It has an effect of a personal message. Frames from Yona's childhood. Shot over the years, periodically in the same room, courtyard, house. Cut together, finally a documentary film about her home is being born, where Yona was raised. Yona assembles these moments to obtain a chronological, general video picture of her maturation. It is what she shows in her pictorial art, in the paintings of still life. The subjects of her video gravitates around a STILL LIFE on the TABLE, accompanying her during the whole life. Everything in Yona's video material is connected to eating and the table. Life and labour on the village is mostly busily associated with that to have food on the table at the end of the day. But the artist does not really show a feast. She depicts humble still life of roots, turnips, onions and potatoes, those that seem coarse, root-vegetables, grown in the soil, important food for humans, for their survival. The subject does not exhibit splendor or riotous life, but the grief of the peasant trying to survive.
"Still Life with Cabbage"/ Size: 150x180cm / oil, canvas
YONA TUKUSER / 2012
Whether she was inspired by Van Gogh? Long ago, he painted "The potato eaters" with hands like roots. In the same way the modern Yona deliberately repeats this allegory from the picture of the genius painter. Although we are not able to register this formally after the first look, but once we sink into a reverie, the wanted analogy between ROOT in the still life art and elements in the hands of peasants-eaters, digging in the dirt, is easily understood. They are being looked into as a part of the body, substantial for their survival. The roots from the paintings symbolize the spirit of the young artist, they have also grown together with the ground.
"Garden Onion"/ Size: 130x150cm / oil, canvas
YONA TUKUSER / 2012
The artist is concise in her exhibition. She focuses our attention on human labor, aiming to produce harvest on the ground. The fruits of the efforts are soiled with mud plain tubers, which are not so beautiful, but they are the result of pictorial art search, worth a million. That is one psychological rummage in the private soil, with an aim to find the root of her social message, and then address it to the audience:- Let the viewer come back to nature in his own, personal way - encourages the young Yona.She draws our attention to those elements of the environment that surrounds us, which has given her strength and beauty, when she walked barefoot on the hot ground and cool, lush grass. The charge, the energy that fills with sparks the eyes of the childhood.
2.3. The modern world, which she watches on TV, where they say about Britney Spears, Hollywood aesthetics, and it all gradually takes possession of her. The dew from the roses evaporates from her eyelashes and they sprayed with silver make-up of a movie star. When Yona comes to town, she stops thinking about food on the table, about that video, which has imprinted the memory of her grandmother, her kinsfolk, how they all cared about a subsistence of the whole family and the bloodline . This memories are being replaced with hodiernal desire today, how to buy a nicer handbag Versace or leather boots from Italy, to ride in a luxury car, to travel around the world, to have that luxury, that she sees in ads. With each new acquired dress or pair of shoes the soul is getting emptier, and a wardrobe fills up.When the connection with nature is being lost, the true joy in the heart of the young lady disappears. This ease of the feelings is gone, which was in the heart of the girl from the village.
She is embezzled with a feeling of dissatisfaction, with the fact that she can not instantly achieve the desired and being dazzled by the achieved. She is possessed by the ambition to constantly satisfying new needs. She is opening the today's flourishing consumer culture and society, surrounded by advertising. It is under the constant pressure and it is morally, spiritually devastating itself. Surplus value of the modern world is an synthetic product, of the humanized allergenic nature.
"Rats gnawing apples"/ Size: 90x120cm / oil, canvas
YONA TUKUSER / 2012
Are there any values still in this world? As it was until recently, the fruits on the table are not appreciated anymore. Before they were considered the finest and most beautiful, perfect creations of nature, because they are above silly vegetables and roots downtrodden into the ground. Fruits are higher and symbolize the spiritual, because they hang on branches of trees above the ground. They are closer to the sun's energy and space, and men are stretching out to pick them, while the vegetables are being left at the feet of people, to lie in the mud and suck the energy of the earth. The fruit is a sign for the overhanging gusts of our life. Sweet fruit has been given as a reward for the work well done. Today these fruits are being eaten by mice (see painting of rats – the apples eaters). Apples gnawed by mice is a grotesque, awakening contemplation about a surplus worth of human labor and cultural value relations.
Metropolis with the rank ofNew York, is marked with a sign of the apple. Today it is attacked by rats. The city symbol of human progress in the modern world and the apple appeared as a sign of the most advanced PC MAC, is bitten off by the gnawer, an analogue to the voracious parasite and consumer in the society. The computerized society today seek for something else, something different from the natural perfection of a beautiful apple. The desire to own a nice house, beautiful woman, rich man and many diamonds, eats away the soul. The delicate apple is nibbled by greedy rat-dandy. New York is like a spitted out stub of an apple after vakhanal feast of rats, isn’t it? Isn’t this symbol to the American progress frayed, as the soul of an urbanized man. Why we do not look for similarities to these symbols with our hearts inside of us? To find them let us look once again to the pictorial art exhibition of Yona worth a million. Let's look at her paintings to seek for our reflection in them and find our spiritual roots, buried deep into the soil of her work.
This way to grow together with the art of a girl from a village, lost in the large metropolis, and to suck with our spiritual life-giving roots the juices of her pictorial art.
"Ducks"/ Size: 90x120cm / oil, canvas
YONA TUKUSER / 2012
3. The expression, that we see in the paintings of Yona, passed through all stages, from personal experience, has evolved to its social commitment – the critique of the modern society. Then it is returning back to the personal, to her confession and whispering something to herself. She cannot any social changes. She cannot make men to live close to nature in the countryside. But, through the art of her paintings, to invoke with a scream imitating an injured bird, personally, every man to consider for himself what he would like to model from the life. The wishes dictated by noble feelings, without using grotesque thoughts and let the modern man not brandishes with social axes. This tool can only be present in her still life as a symbol of obsolete weapons used to survive.There is a need of respective new worldview for the present times… Contemporary avant-garde culture, combined with the earth, which the artist has left. Taken altogether they form a complete exposé, a plea, a calling to the viewer in the exhibition. ROOT is a screaming concept
and a calling for a social awakening, served in a package of curatorial thoughts and words, served with an exhibition.
4.So much said with words is confusing. Isn’t it? But Yona seeks a minimalism, to allow to present her idea as sparkling as possible. It takes an exact might to the said. This might can only be found the paintings of the masters. She convinces the viewer with laconic means. Expression, the colors, that are not very talkative, but restrained, combined into one earth harmony. The painter uses it in order to suggest the most powerful moments of life, what she wants to describe. Namely a masterful pictorial art can easily guide to these thoughts. The pictorial values are served by the gesture of the hand, brush and a choice of the color to influence straight. The concept of ROOT, although very intuitively suggested, but very heartfelt, is woven into the picturesque fabric of the linen. The color panels fully meet the original intention of the exhibition, it will evolve into an angry confession of the man-root. In recreating the picturesque excitement, the artist comes from the fact that at first sight, we see things with the lush colors of dreams. But this is only the beginning. With time all this desiccates... desiccates... desiccates... just like a still life. The colors are fresh till the fruit is recent. With days passed this reverie begins to fade, to rot and eventually remain in the soil, becomes dust, turning into nothing. This way the very rich palette is being combined and reaches the point when the coloration becomes an ash. All this richly dyed glory becomes a gray harmony in a range that Yona uses for her paintings. There are dramatic overtones in the context of the relationship between the gray-black, combined here and there with clear, bright colors. There by she suggests once again a wild expression of the earth and the rural life, against the backdrop of unspoiled nature that she has left. Like this, sublimely, immediately, Yona justifies the expressionism in her paintings. This stylistic technique is combined with the theme that discusses when opens nature, in the relation to the life that she used to live. Counterpoint is the turbulent energy of the modern times. The harmony is wanted in an almost impossible complex combination, with her contrasting past in the rural life. The energy of labor and colors of the fruits, of the sun and ... all this has been buried in time, once it has been hanged framed on the walls of the concrete urban environment.
She is being incinerated by the moments that she has experienced in the city. She thinks that her rural life was insolvent. This are the thoughts that are rushing through right after she asks herself how she will find a way to earn money today, with which to survive. The instruments of labor are no longer plow and hoe, but money. A labor for a living becomes indirect and independent from nature. For her it is a shock to lose a connection with the earth, as she goes to a store to buy food that she produced herself when being small, in the village with her own hands. Now, those hands are covered in red signal manicure and feet № 39, kneading the earth, are wrapped in pink patent leather heels. Nothing in her life is like before. Isn’t her personal stress a compressed in time illustration of the same problem that the modern society experiences? It is being urbanized, encapsulates the earth beneath it, shuts itself in high walls of the city built with engineering, nano precision and at the end dies while awaiting the apocalyptic battle with nature, among military barriers and building constructions, ready for the battle with nature....
With a continuance of a long curatorial essay you can get yourself acknowledged during the exhibition "ROOT".
bottom of page