Lethargy by Angel Korunovski
Thursday, October 16th from 6 to 9 pm: Reception for the Artist in Residence Angel Korunovski
Lethargy, in this context, is a verb whose action manifests through the inadequate behavior of the organism. This inadequacy is personal because it originates from an individual lack of will, strength, energy, ability, or capacity for appropriate behavior within the system’s organic structure. In this way, by transforming the nominal designation into a verbal one, lethargy in these images by Angel Korunovski becomes a collective impossibility—a state in which the individual merges with the crowd, creating a collective action of a particular kind, one that exists simultaneously within the singularity of being, within the individual, within the cell of the crowd.
This action, which the ancient Greeks called drama, in this exhibition by Angel Korunovski is of a bodily kind—that is, the drama (understood as the extreme of lethargy) is articulated through the language of the body in crisis. And that is—a crisis of a body stripped of adornments, a reduced body, a bare body—the kind that exists in several billion instances, in two forms, with minor variations.
From here, the language of these paintings, or rather the articulation of lethargy through the body in a particular time-space, envelops the observer in a unique way: it merges them, both actively and passively, with itself; it draws them into its own lethargy, aligns them with its own qualities, and confronts them with a version of themselves. A lethargic version of themselves.
The paintings before us open contexts of various kinds: intimate and general, shared and unique, individual and collective, abstract and concrete, angelic and demonic, divine and human, natural and artificial, warm and cold. Positioned in this binary way, the images of this artwork are constructed in layers of meaning, which, under the common title Lethargy, encode complex emotional relations of different natures—a drama of various kinds, an action linked to a very specific emotional state, with one single purpose: to point a finger at the observer, just enough to awaken awareness of their personal stake in the collective lethargy, which, like a fog, is spread over the humanity portrayed in these images.
Finally, the critique of a world on the verge of transforming lethargy into apathy and resignation is necessary and must remain constantly present in our consciousness—to keep our reflexes awake, just enough to transform personal lethargy into collective progress.
Sasho Dimoski
Dramaturgist / Writer
Just as Michelangelo, with his fresco titled “The Fall of Mankind” in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, depicts the current dystrophy of medieval society, so Angel Korunovski’s figural compositions in this project strongly emphasize the anemic and lethargic state of society, which, faced in modern times, humanity remains almost breathless. That is why the project is titled “Lethargy”.
Presenting dozens of human portraits and naked bodies in various movements in the drawings presented to us by Korunovski, we recognize the sculptor’s method of testing his idea primarily through a two-dimensional drawing, and then bringing it to life in a sculptural work. Thus, the artist’s obsession with the human body is, in fact, a tool with which he creates a physical image of the human soul. With a pronounced dynamism and great freedom in the painterly movement, without insisting on anatomical precision in the representations of the bodies, the artist focuses on the emotional energy emitted by the figures, thus creating sculptures that he has instilled with a three-dimensional breath so that they speak strongly about the struggles they face in life on a daily basis.
Through the 11 drawings titled “Dystopia”, “Women”, “12”, “Family (Hope and Comfort)”, “Lethargy”, “Obsession”, “Pressure”, “Expectations”, “People”, “In Order”, and “Salvation”, Angel Korunovski, as if on a movie screen, opens up sequences from the genesis of the human biography, faced with the challenges of modern life and with the world flooded with the oppressive social control of the dystopian society, which strives to destroy the hope and comfort that the family creates, in order to lead us to the necessary salvation through the multitude of temptations and mental pressures. This entire vision is, in fact, the result of a subtly stylized and thoughtful conclusion, translated into a high-quality artistic product of an emotional man deeply shaken by the abyss towards which humanity is moving. This cycle of drawings is, in fact, a cry of the artist caused by his deep anxiety about all the evil that humanity faces in the twenty-first century, about the human lack of fighting spirit to oppose the society that degrades one’s self-esteem and normality of life, and yet, all this with the hope that in all the human desert that we leave behind, the warning that he – the man and artist Korunovski – gives with this work will be interpreted and offers a way out to salvation.
Jasminka Namicheva
curator-curator advisor
