Edi HilaPainter of Transformation
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This volume offers the first comprehensive overview of a body of work that stands alone in European contemporary art. Majestically, nightmarishly alone.
It is a follow-up to Edi Hila’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana in 2018. “We suddenly see Hila’s work all at once,” exclaim the three curators in their introduction. “We are largely discovering it for the first time.”
Edi Hila (1944) was once a well-regarded young painter in Enver Hoxha’s isolated and severely controlled communist Albania. He then allowed himself too much color and youthful exuberance in “The Planting of Trees” (1972), the highlight of the very brief Albanian Spring, and was sentenced to heavy labor. Thereafter, he produced only tender, troubled drawings in private until the fall of the dictatorship in 1990. Since then, he has returned to painting. Amidst the chaotic and violent transformations his country been through, writes Hila’s former student and curator Edi Muka, “he painted the background. (…) The paintings became devoid of people. His gaze veers away from them. He turns towards the landscape, towards built structures, situations and objects. It is these painted ‘objects’ that become the witnesses of the events. Yet is impossible to fully know them.”
This book is a gesture of love, awe, and bewilderment. There is love in the works’ careful selection, the accompanying essays, the high quality of the design and lithography, and the photographs of paintings based on photographs. In concluding his short introduction, Hila paraphrases Roland Barthes: photography is a reliable yet fleeting source of evidence. The key word here is: fleeting. For the artist knows that his work will escape even the most loving embrace: “Escape and silence are forms of denial, contradiction; they are resistance and survival, a protest of political and aesthetic dimensions. Escape leaves behind great emptiness and justified absence.”
The abandoned buildings, the sad cars, the desolate family homes—they stretch out, as the eminent French professor of art history Éric de Chassey writes in his essay, between appearance and disappearance. “His work is marked by a sort of voluntary empoverishment, it is the art of understatement and restraint exerting its influence through a type of muffling of reality and of effect, even if monumental in scope.” Much like the other texts, this essay is pervaded by a sense of awe. Where does the painter come from? How is it possible that he educated himself to create masterpiece after masterpiece during decades of isolation? Why do we understand each of these works of art at a deep and personal level, yet struggle for words to describe what we see?
“This sunken world is fragile, walls are almost translucent, light blue and pink, glass houses in a water world. Silhouetted against the light, statues and people—alone or in small groups—seem to be at a loss, exploring surroundings they are not entirely familiar with, their gestures uncertain under the soleil noir of daily melancholia that settled in and stayed.”
Like the characters in Hila’s universe, Adam Szymczyk—a Polish curator who is no stranger to the icons of European art—seems at a loss, shaken, bewildered in the essay he contributes. Hila’s work does not repel the viewer. It is an invitation. But to what? To which submerged territory does it lead us? What unspeakable secrets, what catastrophes have arisen just prior to the images we see?
I met Edi Hila once, in 2005. This was just before he rid his works of people. Edi Muka, who is half Hila’s age, took me to his studio because Hila was the only painter of his generation who enjoyed respect among younger artists. “Because he has the courage to develop,” Muka said. “The courage to doubt what he is doing.” In his bright attic, Hila—a small man with a short white beard and intensely kind eyes—showed us his new work. Carefully processed, reduced, repainted photographic images, drained of color, representing anonymous spaces and human figures about to get lost in them. “We see them from behind,” Hila said. “They are not moving towards me, but away from me. What are they looking for? Our new reality is so insecure, one mystery after the other. And who am I? If I knew the answer,” he smiled with the “tristesse” of someone who had lost years of his life, “I would no longer be painting.”
Chris Keulemans
Chris Keulemans is a traveling writer and journalist living in Amsterdam.
Edi Hila, edited by Joanna Mytkowska, Kathrin Rhomberg, and Erzen Shkololli. Sternberg Press, Berlin 2020
https://kontakt-collection.org/bibliography/51/edi-hila
https://kontakt-collection.org/exhibitions/24/edi-hila-painter-of-transformation-i
https://kontakt-collection.org/exhibitions/25/edi-hila-painter-of-transformation-ii
June 2021
It is a follow-up to Edi Hila’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana in 2018. “We suddenly see Hila’s work all at once,” exclaim the three curators in their introduction. “We are largely discovering it for the first time.”
Edi Hila (1944) was once a well-regarded young painter in Enver Hoxha’s isolated and severely controlled communist Albania. He then allowed himself too much color and youthful exuberance in “The Planting of Trees” (1972), the highlight of the very brief Albanian Spring, and was sentenced to heavy labor. Thereafter, he produced only tender, troubled drawings in private until the fall of the dictatorship in 1990. Since then, he has returned to painting. Amidst the chaotic and violent transformations his country been through, writes Hila’s former student and curator Edi Muka, “he painted the background. (…) The paintings became devoid of people. His gaze veers away from them. He turns towards the landscape, towards built structures, situations and objects. It is these painted ‘objects’ that become the witnesses of the events. Yet is impossible to fully know them.”
This book is a gesture of love, awe, and bewilderment. There is love in the works’ careful selection, the accompanying essays, the high quality of the design and lithography, and the photographs of paintings based on photographs. In concluding his short introduction, Hila paraphrases Roland Barthes: photography is a reliable yet fleeting source of evidence. The key word here is: fleeting. For the artist knows that his work will escape even the most loving embrace: “Escape and silence are forms of denial, contradiction; they are resistance and survival, a protest of political and aesthetic dimensions. Escape leaves behind great emptiness and justified absence.”
The abandoned buildings, the sad cars, the desolate family homes—they stretch out, as the eminent French professor of art history Éric de Chassey writes in his essay, between appearance and disappearance. “His work is marked by a sort of voluntary empoverishment, it is the art of understatement and restraint exerting its influence through a type of muffling of reality and of effect, even if monumental in scope.” Much like the other texts, this essay is pervaded by a sense of awe. Where does the painter come from? How is it possible that he educated himself to create masterpiece after masterpiece during decades of isolation? Why do we understand each of these works of art at a deep and personal level, yet struggle for words to describe what we see?
“This sunken world is fragile, walls are almost translucent, light blue and pink, glass houses in a water world. Silhouetted against the light, statues and people—alone or in small groups—seem to be at a loss, exploring surroundings they are not entirely familiar with, their gestures uncertain under the soleil noir of daily melancholia that settled in and stayed.”
Like the characters in Hila’s universe, Adam Szymczyk—a Polish curator who is no stranger to the icons of European art—seems at a loss, shaken, bewildered in the essay he contributes. Hila’s work does not repel the viewer. It is an invitation. But to what? To which submerged territory does it lead us? What unspeakable secrets, what catastrophes have arisen just prior to the images we see?
I met Edi Hila once, in 2005. This was just before he rid his works of people. Edi Muka, who is half Hila’s age, took me to his studio because Hila was the only painter of his generation who enjoyed respect among younger artists. “Because he has the courage to develop,” Muka said. “The courage to doubt what he is doing.” In his bright attic, Hila—a small man with a short white beard and intensely kind eyes—showed us his new work. Carefully processed, reduced, repainted photographic images, drained of color, representing anonymous spaces and human figures about to get lost in them. “We see them from behind,” Hila said. “They are not moving towards me, but away from me. What are they looking for? Our new reality is so insecure, one mystery after the other. And who am I? If I knew the answer,” he smiled with the “tristesse” of someone who had lost years of his life, “I would no longer be painting.”
Chris Keulemans
Chris Keulemans is a traveling writer and journalist living in Amsterdam.
Edi Hila, edited by Joanna Mytkowska, Kathrin Rhomberg, and Erzen Shkololli. Sternberg Press, Berlin 2020
https://kontakt-collection.org/bibliography/51/edi-hila
https://kontakt-collection.org/exhibitions/24/edi-hila-painter-of-transformation-i
https://kontakt-collection.org/exhibitions/25/edi-hila-painter-of-transformation-ii
June 2021