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vangel naumovski

︎Artist, Painting, Surreal
︎ Ventral Is Golden


“We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery.” - Marshall McLuhan.



Vangel Naumovski was born in the Macedonian city of Ohrid (formerly part of Yugoslavia). After a short spell in the army, he enrolled in art school in Skopje in 1946 for one year, after which he spent the next thirteen years working as a carpenter. During this time, Naumovski's output was initially considered part of the mythic folk tradition, which led to his work being associated with the ‘Naive Art’ movement.

In the early 60s he began painting in a biomorphic surrealist style, where he merged figurative elements within undulating floral abstractions. Salvador Dali once remarked that Naumovski's "work is close to my own... he has some items that may be considered scientific. Also interesting is the biological side of his painting."
Although perhaps a tongue-in-cheek remark from Dali, he nevertheless touched upon the notion of ‘the interface’ present in Naumovski’s work - a point of boundary dissolution between nature and technology on the macro and microscopic levels. His were visuals that could align with early Futurist thoughts of the body as a kind of software, or alongside Archeo-Futurists such as Marshall McLuhan, who often described technology as a kind of environment of the senses that gave rise to a world of effects, interfaces and resonating intervals.

Naumovski’s images in some ways act as fluid mosaics of interdimensional resonance, full bodied philosophical cross-pollinations that elicit audio-tactility in the mind-made body of a total field of feeling. They speak to the mythic and historical cycles of tribal institutions as premonitions that mark their eternal return upon the horizon of the electric space age.





Naumovski's artworks arguably do not represent the phantasmagoria of an individual, but instead detail the biodynamic blueprints of the unconscious mind that feeds back into the rediscovery of the ancient and oral philosophical terrain. It is from this technological environment that the sense-ratios of the ‘reality experience’ alter.
In the context of a modern reality with relatively less material yearnings than previous decades, and a stronger sense of being driven by more abstract aspirations that move us from within, being able to locate their historical and ecological form becomes increasingly important if society is to move into a more harmonious relationship with the physical environment. As Mcluhan suggested, the modern technological man (that is the electric man) is in a process of rediscovering the body due to the ‘disembodying’ caused by the electric environment, and as a result, strange revivals emerge as a way to relate us to those old natural laws.


Taking into consideration the many paradigm shifts throughout history, such as Giordano Bruno's radical notion that the universe appeared infinite when he looked up towards the stars, Copernicus' discovery that the Sun and not the Earth was at the centre of the solar system ​(Heliocentrism), the western discovery of ‘linear perspective’ in the early 15th centruy (Filippo Brunelleschi), to the development of Cubist perspectives adopted from the African arts, we can begin to understand that reality has in fact always been augmented with concepts of technology and technique relating to the perception of space and time, and how to utilise the mass of swirling energies that accumulate there. This leads to the question of whether the physical world has always remained the same, as within a framework of universal constants which renders certain phenomena impossible, or that the constants of the physical world are in fact inconsistent and change throughout space and time, rendering certain phenomena only possible during specific timeframes - a non-uniformitarian approach to universal constants.

"This is melting-together of technology, this globalization of culture, this creation of an electromagnetic sea of information - these are phenomena that only happen in the terminal moments of the planetary breakthrough." - Terence McKenna









McLuhan’s sensibilities regarding culture can be mostly contained in the idea that it is shaped by the kinds of media we use. For at least five hundered years during the acclimatisation towards the printing press and ‘linearity’ in all its forms, society underwent a migration toward centrality, with concepts of ‘the public’ and ‘the people’ being centrally defined by notions of governance and morality. For only the last fifty years, the acclimatisation of the mind towards electricty has shifted our sense-ratios back into a more tribalised and fragmentary mental environment at a much faster pace (what McLuhan called - amongst other things - the ‘illumiated manuscript’), where meaning is not ‘read’ but instead ‘looked at’.
In this sense our tools for generating meaning are not only tools but also environments. These tools can be traced to the unconscious assumptions of print and the linearity of typography. It is another way of saying that what fractal mathematics has done for the electric age, linear perspective did for the European Renaissance. Humanity suffered a fall from the book, from reading, and found redemption through the context of a narrative, firmly fixed by terrestrial time and the anxiety of being technologically disembodied.
This is the environment that we are inheriting.

In most of his works, McLuhan goes onto point out that without any knowledge of why so called primitive man painted two dimensionally and literate man tends towards painting in perspective, we can never know why man ceased to be primitive and in what sense-ratios the primitive mind is limited, and by the same token, we cannot know in what sense-ratios the primitive mind was exalted, having by definition no fixed perspective that situated the body inside a different conception of space and time.

These poles of the spectrum of possibilities brought about by the space exploration, war demonstrations and psychedelics of the 1960s might have been a preoccupation for Naumovski and other artists finding themselves in them midst of an electrically modern, ‘naive art’ expression.


With titles such as ‘Black Cradle of Bright Life’, ‘Galaxy from the Otherside of the Sun’, ‘Atlantis’, ‘Cosmic Cathedral’ and ‘Prohibited Thoughts’, it is clear that Naumovski was occupied in some sense with the turmoil of the pre-historical mind, the spiritual experience of the collective and the assumptions that certain epistemological processes make about the physical and non-physical, or the marco and microscopic, worldview.

As all technologies embody the unconcious motives in relation to the evolution of our species, our yearning to understand the worlds they render and to fully integrate what lies beyond their technological boundaries affect our notions of the material body and its limitations. When technology advances, it invokes and reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again until the age of decentralisation becomes the age of ‘The Self’.



“He sights for such self awareness and correction of cultural bias in his ‘coll-idea-scope’. This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash.” - Marshall McLuhan.


What will the new sense-ratios of the psyche become once the printed universe we once moved within has fully disintegrated and the non-linearity of the electric age has infused memory with the speed of light? For Naumovski, it appeared that his poetic, circular overtones and his aquatic micro-biological gardens were sanctuaries to reorient the body, during waves of social and technological revolution that would have defined much of the era in which he was painting.






Further Reading ︎
Surrealism, Bio
Riding Range with Terence McKenna, lecture
Ray Kurzweil predictions
The Medium is the Message, website 

Theodore Roszak on Ecological Consciousness


Mark