Nedko Solakov

Who's the artist? you ask Nathalie fingertips on the stem of a flute of their best of the best, cuvée speciale, I guess. Nedko Solakov has a grin that could tell you something about art and it's tendentious humor in dark times.

As the art market gets difficult some rise and show their funny button like no one else.

As cars burn and Chavez sells cheap oil the new trend seems to inflect a self-derision that may be healthy after all the serious aesthetic stuff of earlier decades.

Nedko Solakov was born in Bulgaria and has exhibited internationally. He is attractive for his Bulgarian sense of humor and usurpation. For this show at the galerie Georges-Philippe&Nathalie Vallois  on 36 rue de Seine, he asked for 12 canvases that should conform to academic standarts (and in his words from the PR:)" in the grrreat trrradition of Frrrench painting."

His naive, almost childish paintings... he quickly marked down in words and images an allegory of his day dreams, nightmares, hopes and wishes -- what went through his head. He gave himself a dead line and it looks that way, but the experiment bears fruit. You start cogitating as you sip your sparkling tranquilizer. And Nedko keeps on grinning like the little man in his paintings, a transformation of art now and here.

In the Project room are the works of Matthew Antezzo, "Ex Post Facto" through his last ten years of iconographic recreation of iconographic moments of history mostly in black and white that look like totems of a lost society.