Ruben Brulat / Aleksandar Petkov – C’est pour ça que l’on s’enfonce en toi

Comunicato stampa

Ncontemporary is glad to present C’est pour ça que l’on s’enfonce en toi, a show with works by Ruben Brulat ((1988, France) and Aleksandar Petkov (1994, Bulgaria).

The two artists arrive at this exhibition from different fields of research and through different languages, yet they share an attention to what happens when matter ceases to be merely surface, object, or landscape and becomes something with which one must physically engage.

For Ruben Brulat, this relationship has long emerged through the crossing of places. In his photographs, the body appears immersed in vast territories, often difficult and almost never domesticated, taking its place within them without imposing itself. It stretches out, adheres, blends into the ground, as though the distance between figure and landscape could progressively diminish until it almost disappears.

Aleksandar Petkov, on the other hand, works through accumulation, layering, and the transformation of different materials, constructing forms that seem to retain the process that generated them. Nothing appears completely smoothed out or resolved: tensions, irregularities, and the points at which one material encounters another remain visible, where one rests upon, supports, contains, or contradicts the other.

The title of the exhibition comes from one of Brulat’s poems: Regarde regarde l’eau qui boit le tout […] c’est pour ça que l’on s’enfonce en toi. S’enfoncer means to enter, to sink, to venture further in, but it also contains the idea of a progressive loss of stability. It is a movement towards something that ultimately alters the person who makes it. In Brulat’s photographs, this passage takes place through the body; in the poems, it enters language. In Petkov’s works, it remains imprinted in matter, in its taking shape without entirely losing what it was before.

With thanks to Galleria Studio G7, Bologna.