The sculptor Emil Venkov is primarily a modeller. He has to feel the pliable material with his sensitive hands and endow it with a new form. Venkov is a sculptor of strong passions and intense inner tension streaming through his fingers into the sculptures, sending messages to humans. He dramatically grasps the sculptural form, manifesting himself as a sensitive artist with a sense of the metaphorical, almost an imaginative rendering of the motif. Perhaps it rather concerns the motif than the theme as it embraces a wider range of meaning. The motif is merely the point of departure for the stylistic treatment of sculpture. Accordingly, there is a difference between the robust baroque-like, yet ironically playful form of the series of circus motifs and the sculptures of a surrealist tenor, and the bird men of the type of Metamorphoses. They culminate in the series of mythical Phoenixes. The intuitive poetic treatment of form is manifested in the vibrating modelling of the surface, dematerialising the sculptures with the contrast of light.
The Phoenix as a symbol of almost absolute dematerialisation is also a symbol of the impossibility of destroying matter and the idea of human faith. The artist’s creativity oscillates between lamentations
about the dramatic destiny of mankind and its great hopes. Because hope is the message mankind passes on in relays from the past to the present.
