Harmony and logic, aesthetics and mathematics are all united in the works of Valentin Stefanoff. They are always related in a very organic way and although the components of this unity can often be “registered”, the allover impact of homogeneous delicacy is always preserved. The artists has this special ability to observe and analyze his impressions immediately, within the space of a given work. He is attracted by the mystically perfect formula, the aestheticism of the completed scientific concept, the possibility to overcome the void between the artistic and the rational. His works are thought out and realized with sophisticated precision and respect for detail. It’s as if these are investigating the border between the creative and the other human talents while hinting at their mutual nostalgia.  
At the same time, each work by Valentin Stefanoff leaves the impression that it is part of a larger process, that it is a fragment from a certain system of thought where the technical logic and constructive order are subordinated to the freedom of personal choice and decision, of independent thinking. The artist manages to transgress the exterior dynamic of life into a tense stability where space is a metaphor for the chaos in nature, while illusion is nothing but its beauty. Space is indeed one of the most important factors: it is structuring the composition regardless of the media used; it generates meanings. The interactions between, on one side, space with the delicate interventions of the artist which often seem to have “happened” by themselves, and on the other, time which is an acknowledged participant in his works, are clearly balanced. One often experiences the association with discrete musical phrases, remembered in the darkness of the night, that somehow miraculously come out as a melody.  
Valentin Stefanof, with his typical economy of means, is creating a powerful visual metaphor for our everyday life with both its manic suicidal tendencies and the constant strive for reconstruction and renovation. He is attempting to liberate these from the layers of “literature” and to keep them only as a context for his own observations. His well articulated visual language does not aim to interfere in the real world, nor does it play around with its concrete materiality. Nor does it turn its back to the artist’s empirical experiences, to his fought for ability to see the dialectic of things and to penetrate meanings which have lost their original form. 
Iara Boubnova



AN ART THAT LEAVES THE DOOR AJAR
Richard Rorty, the renowned American pragmatist philosopher, says that there are “three ways in which a new belief can be added to our previous beliefs – viz., perception, inference, and metaphor”. He goes on to claim that “to think of metaphor as a third source of beliefs …. is to abandon the idea that the aim of thought is the attainment of a God’s-eye view.” Valentin Stefanoff’s art, which definitely seeks to make us believe in the beliefs it seeks to make, rests upon the three pillars that Rorty suggests.
Stefanoff’s photographs and video installations make a point of perceiving the world as it is with only a subtle, albeit obvious, twist: think of the white angel-like shadows of human beings ambling along the streets of Beaubourg next to “real” humans. We only get a narrow opening through the unobtrusive shift in perspective. There is only a “colouring of the imagination”, as William Wordsworth would put it. The door to a new world is ajar.
At the same time, the artist’s recent drawings do not make much sense and cannot generate belief unless the beholder is ready to infer: what does this maze of lines, arrows, and points stand for? The answers are legion. The logic of the world as we know it can take us only halfway on the quest for meaning: what we see will remind us of those obscure circuit schemes that engineers will use. But what is it that makes of each of these an objet d’art? What is it that propels them into a space beyond mere utility? What other reality do these schemes seek to schematize for us? The door is still ajar./
The same applies to the metaphorical layer of Stefanoff’s works. If you expect a foolhardy, frantic rush for novel destinations that lie at the end of the road of metaphor, you’d better switch to a different train. This artist’s images always keep one foot on the ground of endlessly multiplying metaphors: think of the reading between the lines which turns out to be nothing more than…reading between the lines. What this tongue-in-cheek revival of a dead metaphor seems to say is that we are, for better or for worse, creatures defined by language, and therefore we cannot hope to escape from the comforting embrace of metaphor. The video leaves the door between the metaphorical and the literal ajar, and the space on that side is not more significant than the space on this side. The space on that side is the space of the literal. It is the space that philosophers like Spinoza have attempted to attain. In pursuing that space, you can say things like “God is a substance”./
Stefanoff, even when he literalizes his metaphors, prefers to modestly stay within the space where metaphors will multiply forever. He has important things to say, but he knows that “a God’s eye view” would be a bit too much to ask.
Lubomir Terziev