Boredom is the root of all evil

Dovetail is a nomadic curatorial project bringing both international and UK-based emerging artists together to create a site-specific installation focusing on the architectural terraformation of the traditional gallery space into a new sculptural plane on which to dictate interactions between artworks via an environmental sculptural ground. 'Boredom is the Root of all Evil' is Dovetail's upcoming collaborative exhibition bringing together the work of sculptor Manuel Cornelius and painter Stefania Batoeva taking place at the Art in Perpetuity trust in London.

Both artists share a special ability to draw out the space between an emerging narrative with specialised objects. This exhibition has been designed to take this raw potential and create a space that is built up purely of that potential, stretching out the process of becoming into spatial tangibility. Despite working across very different mediums, both artists share an unusual sense of narrative construction, drawing from the remnants of everyday life to devise otherwise unforeseen combinations through a free play of imagination, spontaneity and abstraction.

Stefania Batoeva’s works, which are all compositionally different from one another, have a perplexing unifying quality that ties them together. The aura they emanate explores the limits of knowing and reaches into the zones of uncertainty and codependency between the physical and the imaginary. In many of her works, there are overriding, heavy lines spanning from the background to the foreground, which seems to depict simultaneous events and emotion evoked through the figurative postures that recline, reach, and slouch throughout her layered fields. Batoeva’s works are multi-faceted and contain many layers (both literal through the brushstrokes and layering of frames and metaphorical through the feelings they evoke). Through her unusual narrative construction, Batoeva is able to connect herself, her work, and the viewer through an attractive mutual desire for understanding.

Manuel Cornelius’ sculptures deal with the language of objects. In the spirit of semiotics, he assumes that the perceptible exterior of things contains a code that can be deciphered and read. In his works, he examines how this code is constructed, communicated, and sometimes takes on a life of its own. He is particularly interested in the crossover point at which the product’s language can no longer be reliably deciphered, but the objects still have an affecting echo of their familiar origins.

For this exhibition Cornelius will present a new series of works primarily composed of elastic materials and agar jelly, a perishable boiled algae extract which allows non-human forces such as natural phenomena and organisms to be incorporated into the sculptural process. The ephemerality of these works executed in an organic material result in objects that have left their sterile, formal shelter and have been transferred to a state of fragility and decay producing forms that strive away from fulfilling their role.