Each path can but does not have to have its beginning and its ending. It can be straight, winding or circular. It can be the path of the great winner, the path of the eternal martyr (Sissify path) or the path of the loser. There is a real one but there is an imaginary one too; a path with or without direction of movement; a spiritual or earthly one. The path we take; the path we go back: the path of the known; the path of oblivion; Life; death. The path can be a street, a throughway, a path and on the other hand the path is connected to other more relevant terms: picturing and realizing the idea, thought, communication, transition, change, symmetry, coincidence, bloodstream, telepathy, way of the truth / way of the lie, path of the light, sound etc. It connects with action travelling, walking, a direction, arrow, and sign. However no matter which segment of its meaning is emphasized, the path is bind to physical changes (in most cases to its categorical references, with exception of the transcendental or metaphysical that cannot be substituted materially). The most essential physical changes are diagnosed using mathematical calculations, with a result presented with a number that usually determines the speed of movement, frequency, number of subjects that passed on the one hand and the time that passes, flows, on the other. The number and the path as general terms are in a symbiosis and give certain implications for the new technologic era, the computer binary system, encoding, decoding, digitalization, internet communication.

These language games and meditations, roughly presented or lexically transferred, are just a few of the possible suggestions to "demystify" the latest conceptually thought project of the artist Goce Nanevski. Nanevski tries to visualize the above-mentioned problems and materialize his idea the category "Path". Nanevski is an established young sculptor, who has so far realized, with his visual poetics, aesthetically artistic as well as technical sculptures, objects and installations made in metal (metal profiles, black tin and waste metal pieces). Penetrating all the secrets of the performance, he has created works of art up to perfection, in which the principle of primarily of the form, geometry, minimalism, tendency to monumentally dominate; moving gradually towards releasing from the empty, closed volume and creating a spatial ornament of metal bars, wires and tins.

Retaining a great deal of his formal purity (from his previous phases) in his last project, Nanevski introduces certain changes. Their infiltration is gradual and not too emphasized, it indicates to a mild and skilful transformation, which contains the code or the artist's personal mark. In the first place, it is about presenting a general concept whose visualization tries to introduce a story. The second innovation is in experimenting and self-testing in a new media for him the video, whose role is, together with the object installation, to supplement or explain better the primary idea. I have found the third innovation in structuring and shaping the plastic object itself. Nanevski introduces plastic and metal wheels with numbers in it (that have lost their functionality) which did not changed into the piece of art (since he has used previously metal waste but he has changed them, solder, welder them to the main structural nucleus). In this case, they are used as ready-made objects, whose meaning changes the creation shaped in that way, placing them in a new context. The counters (as plastic matrix) successively ordered, strung, and methodically multiplied onto the whole surface (with elements of pattern art) are built in into the metal construction. The object has longitude form as implication of a path and its higher spatial installation (on metal platforms construction that determines a square that are a molding part of the object and have active role in the aesthetic emphasis of the creation) and its aim is to offer a different point of view and changed standpoint. The wavy surface of the horizontal portion achieved with the counters setting has certain "organic" accords in which way it suggests dynamics and trembling of the static composition. As a whole, the composition dominates with its monumentality, geometry, restraint, purity as well as hypnotics. It raises a question without offering final answer, leaving some space and offering "way" for individual interpretation.

The video, as a second segment of the project, also suggests a visual minimalism presented by using a static camera that registers movement on a throughway and public pedestrian zone, in the first part, by increasing the zoom, the camera focuses on a very small part of the straightway and registers very abstractly as a stain, everything that passes there. The audio sound that follows it is the original sound of the movement of the cars.

In the second part, the camera is fixed to a lowered frame of a promenade and only the feet of numerous passersby, whose identity is unknown and in this case irrelevant, are registered. The music, which accompanies this segment, contributes to the dynamics of the monotonous show. During the whole presentation there is a text going on (with wearing speed) which defines the term speed. The whole action in the video goes on in a horizontal course, with synchronic-diachronic rhythm and contrasts concerning the dynamics and the sound. The video is conceived to run nonstop, as a piece without beginning and end.

The fine aesthetics and unification of the project itself is recompensed with the black and white colors that follow through the spatial object and the video. In that way, the emphasis is totally on the concept itself and the discourses that come out of it.

With his project "Path", Nanevski confirms his qualities once again, underlying the fact that sculpture as an artistic form has much to offer yet, especially combined with the new media and their possibilities and if it is visualized and realized in a contemporary context.

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Ana Frangovska, curator

From the exhibition catalogue, April 2006.