The Uncomfortable Mistery of Painting.
Stefano Romano

We have tried to define it through words that could in some way “compose” a kind of inventory. Painting, before being a technique, is a gaze, and this could be the first word of our list. The painter (or the artist more generally) observes reality by constructing and deconstructing, assembling and dismantling all the elements that interest him, in order to “frame” what he truly needs, deciding what to focus on, what to blur (borrowing these terms from photographic language), and what to leave outside the canvas that he is building in his mind. Paraphrasing a passage by Yi-Fu Tuan on walking, using the sense of sight, we might say that looking is a skill, but if I can “see” myself while I look and I can hold that image in my mind so that I can analyze what I am observing and which elements I am choosing, then I also have knowledge.
Thus, we add another element after the gaze: knowledge. This element is necessary so that the gaze does not remain on the surface but has the ability to analyze what surrounds it in order to choose which elements to keep and which to let go. All of this work happens before the brush even touches the canvas, like a kind of preparatory scenario. The moment of visual restitution of this image on the canvas is the physical act of painting; it is the restitution of a world that is no longer “only” reality, but rather the interpretation of reality through a process we have defined as the knowledge of reality through the gaze. It is what we could call a passage. In this way, we can add another element to our definition of painting: the passage from gaze to canvas. This is the culminating moment of painting, the moment in which the artist lets us see, through his point of view, the world he has built through the wise selection of the elements of reality he wanted to keep, combine, dismantle, and reassemble. It is also the moment of passage from gaze to a physical object; to the canvas that becomes the container of this gaze. Through brushstrokes, the artist defines what he wants us to see and how he wants us to see it.

This passage allows us to add another word – essential, I would say – in our definition of painting: gesture. Gesture is what identifies and makes one pictorial research unique from another. It is directly connected to the artist’s gaze, it defines in detail his painterly quality and gives us a key to read his inner gaze upon the external world. Gesture also contains within itself another element that helps us to further define painting: ritual. Derrida emphasized how the repetition of a movement defines the construction of a rite. This idea applies unequivocally also – and above all – to painting, where the gesture of the brushstroke is repeated infinitely, and the gaze is fixed on the canvas, brushstroke after brushstroke after brushstroke.

What is painting, then? We have defined painting as gaze, knowledge, passage, gesture, and ritual. These words, which constitute only one possible inventory of painting, are undoubtedly also present in the pictorial practice of Idlir Koka (Albania, 1979). And if we were to attempt at this point to define his practice more specifically, we could also add three other words: memory, the uncanny, and irony. In the images created by Idlir, memory seems to be the beam that sustains the weight of the painting. It is something that does not even always need to be explicitly declared as such, but it is certainly a central element in his gaze and in his knowledge of Albanian reality.

Idlir’s gesture, his passage from gaze to canvas, translates into a painting that does not freeze the subject, does not define it with clear details and contours. Rather, his characters always seem almost on the verge of moving, because the brushstroke creates spots that vibrate next to each other, producing the sensation of a continuous flickering of our gaze. Stains that seem able to cross time and space and become part of the ongoing movement of our present. In this way, memory is actualized, leaving us inside a doubt, into this uncanny space that the Albanian painter’s images offer us – an uncanny space within which we remain
uncomfortable, far from our certainties.

This way of painting causes the melancholy that often accompanies the memory of a time that no longer exists disappears, dissolved by the irony that the artist widely use. A bitter irony that contributes to sharpening that sense of discomfort we experience, and a subtle sense of inadequacy in the way we must relate to these images.

In my view, the strength of Idlir Koka’s painting lies precisely in his ability to leave us at the threshold of a world that seems to be more than just a memory. It is a living world, and therefore dangerous, sharp-edged even though it comes from other times and other spaces. It is so close to us that we can see it vibrate.

Portraits, fragments of landscape, objects of everyday life are all subjects of the catalogue of life that the artist stages, merging memory, the uncanny, and irony. The characters in the paintings seem to question themselves – and us – about their very existence, whether they are living beings or objects of our daily life. This ever-vibrating painting allows us to peer through the gaps left by the stains that compose it, as if they were surfaces that could be shifted in order to better see – or to peek – more deeply into the sufferings, traumas, laughter, skin folds, and edges of objects, as if these stains were pieces of tree bark that, thickening, reveal the mystery of passing time.

Perhaps what the artist is trying to tell us is that the most intimate meaning of painting is this metaphorical gesture made through the gaze, to free ourselves from the outer layers and slip ever deeper into the inner things of our world, accepting the risk of becoming entangled in them, in an uncomfortable and unsolvable mistery.