MAUSOLEUM OF A MAMA’S BOY | DUMISANI KARAMANSKI

MAUSOLEUM OF A MAMA’S BOY
DUMISANI KARAMANSKI
September 28 – October 20

Official opening: 28, Thursday, 6.00 p.m.
Credo Bonum Gallery, 2 Slavyanska St., entrance from Benkovski St.

Who is this mama’s boy and what made him into who he is? Maybe he is a self-satisfied spoilt brat, or maybe he is an unwitting hero. He might be a careless and slightly useless freeloader or, perhaps, a person who has been forced by fate and the people around him to accept their help. He might be a mama’s boy, but he also might be a man of resolve who recognizes in women and queer people around himself an alternative to obtrusive toxic masculinity. Is he dependent on his mother, or is he just searching for people who are as exceptional as she is? Are we the ones killing him, or is he burying himself through growing up? Who are his helpers and who are his torturers? Is this mausoleum a celebration or rather just a personal repository for his legend? Does he exist or is he just a fiction?

Not only the audience, but also the artist himself faces these questions. Dumisani Karamansky does not give unambiguous answers and asks ambiguous questions. His self-reflexivity is understood as both imperative and intrinsically subjective to such an extent that it gives rise to an extreme example of autofiction. All biographical traces are dilute in an extravagant absurd fairytale. Priest-Dumisani has cast a fishing rod with a silver cross and merman-Dumisani has caught it between his teeth in the air, like a vicious water spirit. A half-naked Peter Pan-Dumisani is watching a figure leaving the half-nightmarish, half-surreal scene of a lightning storm. From one side of the fence an enraged Big Bird-Dumisani is defending himself and Dina Stoev, who has been caught in a net, from strange demons, while in an all-quiet next-door yard a familiar sleeping girl is levitating above the succulent meadows in front of her pink house. Dina Stoev, with a look as equally stern as it is crazed, as if tired of life and his burden, is pushing a cross-dressing-fairy-Dumisani in a shopping cart. An upside-down mythological bat-woman in a latex suit, whose face we might also be able to recognize, has spread her wings in a cave, with Dumisani impaled on her legs.

In these seemingly highly private and coded narratives, we can in fact see the artist’s commitment to explore a sharply felt contemporary actuality. An actuality in which the very existence of some of us is turned into a political, social, psychological and bodily resistance. Dumisani’s paintings speak of this world, but instead of seeing in them a retelling, we are faced with a new mythology, which gives us a livelier, more ironic and a truer notion of reality, precisely because it is so bright and incandescent. We cannot relax in front of these paintings because they are somehow too uncomfortable. Something sinister is hiding behind the priest’s beatific smile, and the merman is biting into the cross like a bloodthirsty shark. Peter Pan’s fairytale world is as wondrous as it is deadly. The otherwise welcoming and polite Big Bird is in a fight with evil forces. The fairy is a comically determined commander and the one pushing the cart has reached the limit of his strength and patience. The bat-woman has dragged her victim into the cave.

The sentimental and the emotional are reverberating with an almost theatrical clarity and are starting to seem almost forced. At the same time, the irony has reached its peak and it feels like it is almost breaking under its own weight. The sincere seems ironic. The ironic seems sincere. Dumisani builds works in which the irony is positioned against itself and the audience is left in a state of rational and emotional uncertainty. This duality of potential meanings, of a work’s tone and atmosphere are an entirely deliberate artistic stance. However, it does not stem from a desire for vagueness. On the contrary, this borderline condition is the truth itself – the emotional and rational truth of contemporary wo/man.
It seems that the only place an audience can find some certainty is in the expression. It is simultaneously in the brushwork, in the psychological and in the rational. The paintings’ sizes are big and almost startling, and the canvases are stuck to the walls of the gallery with duct tape. There are no underframes. The decorative elements and the spray-painted color fields are almost diametrically opposed to the brushwork and feed into the contrast between themselves and the expressive gestures, which build the rest of the compositions. The psychological charge, paradoxically, is as ambiguous as it is distinct in both its different connotations, as well as its entirety. This state is supported by the mixing and matching of various visual languages and is also driven by the narrative nature of the works.

It is noteworthy that Dumisani does not just consider himself through a particular point of view, beyond that, he invites his friends, the ones who have potentially taken on the role and are caring for “mama’s boy”, to participate in the project in one way or another. Raya Apostolova‘s texts enter into a debate with Dumisani’s irony, as well as turn into a sort of mirror for the sincere emotional drive behind his works. The audience does not get a key, nor an instruction as to the way they are supposed to interpret this interaction, and certainly not, any help in deciphering the paintings. Do his trusted friends support mama’s boy? Are they harnessed in the pursuit of his personal dreams? Or is their presence here just a reflection of their life – people, who give their point of view, respond rationally and react emotionally with the artist and the person. The concept and the presentation of the exhibition turn out to be a metaexample of one of its main points of significance – the relationships and the meanings behind them both in the life and the art of the artist himself.

The present text exists simultaneously in a similar and in a completely different condition. My own likeness shows up in two of the paintings and I think that Dumisani inviting me to write this, constitutes an additional metareferential level. My way of looking at us, our friendship, our professional connection and our work, as well as my own personal esthetic preferences and ethical ruminations, are an instrument, used in the examination of these very things themselves. These metarelations are developed on several levels and they put the friend and fellow artist, with his own knowledge of the other person, the artist and his artistic process, in a position of half-helper, half-critic, half-subject of the examination. Furthermore, it is as much a personal gesture towards me, as it is a completely rational artistic decision. Through it, Dumisani gives information, but also encloses the process in a knot of personal and professional relations and bonds, thus positioning them in a perpetual self-examining circle of metareferences. It turns out to be true – “My Brother is My Fairy Godmother”. The question is which one of us is the fairy godmother?

 Dina Stoev

Dumisani Karamansky was born in Weimar, Germany in 1995, but he lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2015 he graduated with a professional degree in painting from The National School of Fine Arts and continued his education in the National Academy of Art, where he graduated with a BFA in painting under Professor Andrey Daniel and Assistant Professor Pravdoliub Ivanov in 2019 and with an MFA in painting in 2021.

The project is implemented with the support of the National Culture Fund.