Guide To The Unconscious

How does painting today continue to reflect on its own existence and on the mechanisms of perception? How does it still generate contents and states that escape institutional frameworks, allowing worlds to be experienced as real?

Since its emergence, the classical painted image has functioned as a window into another world. In the context of the Wunderkammer, however, painting ceases to be a window and transforms into a “box-medium”, a new kind of open trap for our sense of reality. It no longer depicts curiosities; it becomes one itself, a spatial curiosity in which images coexist as disorienting fragments. Painting thus shifts from a site of representation to a peculiar site of presence.

In his exhibition Guide to the Unconscious, Deyan Yanev presents large-scale paintings that lure the viewer with the virtuosity of the Old Masters, yet instead of an ordered world, they offer visual illusions, anomalies, and contents that explore the strange realm of biochemical chaos as a metaphor for human consciousness. What unfolds is a kind of contemporary “micro-psychobiology,” employing visual tools that validate ideas rooted in Renaissance natural philosophy, particularly the understanding of the human being as a microcosm dissolved within nature. We encounter figures and associations drawn from the deep history of painting, echoes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, alongside references to the iatrochemistry of Paracelsus, his theories of signatures and the archeus, as well as inscriptions tied to modern biopsychology, which interprets psyche and behavior through the influence of hormones and genetics.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Surrealists were the first to revive the Wunderkammer model in a modern context — its illogical arrangement of images and objects, and its blending of different eras and styles, all aimed at stimulating the subconscious. In this spirit stands Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp — a portable modern Wunderkammer, a “box in a suitcase” containing miniature reproductions of his works, transformed into a personal cabinet of curiosities. Deyan Yanev’s project gathers images and ideas cultivated over the past two decades, culminating in this exhibition. It is conceived as a space of “sacred violence” upon the eye, operating somewhere between the museum and the laboratory. At its core lies the tension of vision: an ecstatic moment in which the eye ceases to “understand” and begins to “feel” the charge of biochemical intensities. These paintings embody the biochemical behavior of painting itself, while simultaneously narrating their own paradoxical fate through vast diagrammatic compositions resembling biochemical maps. When contemporary painting adopts the structure of the cabinet of curiosities, it becomes a new type of medium — one that attempts to survive in the digital age by offering materiality and tactility that the screen cannot provide. In his book Painting Today (1), Tony Godfrey describes a “new surrealism” marked by anxiety toward the biological body, which no longer exists in a pure state. From this stems the unease radiating from contemporary figurative painting — an anxiety tied to the loss of control over the body and its psychobiological processes. At the same time, this anxiety pushes painting to construct a dense, weighty medium that engages the body on its own terms, counterbalancing the lightness of digital scanning.

Yanev’s painting exerts an explosive impact through its multi-layered perceptual structure, a contradictory complex of optical overlays and illusions that transform the physical surface of the canvas into a dense psychological experience. This approach employs the strategy of visual noise: the senses become overloaded with detail and illusion, logical thinking is exhausted, and the plastic languages begin to communicate directly with the unconscious, bypassing the censorship of reason. Art becomes a hypnotic medium, guiding the viewer’s inner world through the force of color and form. This approach is not only fully realized in Yanev’s practice but also theoretically developed in his doctoral dissertation (2023). (2)

For Yanev, the painterly cabinet of curiosities is not a collection of unusual images, but a map of the biochemical processes that govern our hidden desires. Painting becomes a medium that does not merely communicate meaning, but literally “conducts” the chemistry of the body. In this sense, each painting functions as a laboratory — not to show, but to induce states by engaging the invisible processes of the human psyche. The large, enigmatic works in the exhibition embody the perpetual split between the physical existence of the painting as object and the psychological presence of the image as enigma. They interrupt chronology as a mechanism that absorbs the past and projects it into the future, creating a distinct sense of simultaneity. This is a transtemporal moment — one that gives rise to art as an “immortal subject,” preserving the act of seeing beyond time. (3)

Written by Peter Tsanev

Deyan Yanev (b. 1984) lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria. He holds a PhD in Painting from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia and, through the Erasmus program, specialized at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He has been a resident at Cité internationale des arts in Paris. His practice includes over twenty solo exhibitions across Bulgaria, Germany, and France, as well as numerous group exhibitions and international projects. He has been nominated for and awarded multiple prizes in painting.

Footnotes
1. Tony Godfrey. Painting Today. London: Phaidon Press, 2009.
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2. Deyan Yanev. Psychological Delusions and Illusions as a Means in Contemporary Painting During the First Two Decades of the 21st Century (Doctoral Dissertation). Sofia: National Academy of Arts, 2023.
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3. Peter Tsanev. Transtemporal Aesthetics. Sofia: National Academy of Arts, 2025.
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