IN ARTISTIC SEARCH OF LIFE – HOMELAND (ON THE PAINTING ART OF RESHAT AHMETI)

“When I destroy a plant, I disturb a star!” – Buddhist proverb

The man is a part of natural universe faced up to the mystery of infinity. The painting as one of the artistic codes is a witness to the metamorphoses in the world and the eternal setting and changing the limits of the horizons. The artist is always faced up to the challenge of the eternity. The art, turned to the non temporal dimension of the man is addressing every single human regardless of his origins and identity. Maybe the variations of the identities are the secret of all arts.

Hand in hand with the art, the man is in search of his unity with the life’s homeland which is the miracle of every art. The philosophers in their concepts try to convince us that there is always some hardly tangible balance between the natural order, natural sciences and exact cognitions that the artists are in the search of.

 

The painter Reshat Ahmeti too anchored to mental relief of the Balkans and its rich tradition is in search of his artistic universe for decades. He is in search of exits to the European post modern values. Aware of the fact that the color is the apotheosis of light and the beautiful stands for the truth, our painter guided by the spring of the Mediterranean rays and their refraction in the drama of life, in the geometrical festivity of the spiritual heritage, in the intellect, builds up his painting poetics from painting to painting, from cycle to cycle.

The drama of man, twisted between the earth and the skies is often left to the outcome of the vision of the artist and the power of his imagination. The heroes of Marc Chagall fly to the sky and “stop in the clouds” as if they are free from gravitation. They reach the feeling of freedom in their uncertain exile while discovering the code of the freedom and the colors, in spite of being the captives of the magic and mystical realism of the painter.

In the paintings of Reshat Ahmeti the “geometrical contour lines” between the sky and the earth with a powerful imaginative presence of the “absent man”, his traces and paths left in the eternal existence are marked. Ismail Kadare argues about the paintings of Reshat Ahmeti in which the feeling of freedom dominates: freedom of colors and forms, intertwining of the geometrical forms…the earth and the sky, substance and the spirit… shapes and the history of dream…

The Balkan artist today, crucified between the tradition and the sequence of dominant style formations throughout several centuries (Renaissance, Classicism, Baroque, Romanticism and Realism) and the modernity is faced up to a particular challenge: to be identified with the nature and to get to the essence of its function with his creative genius. In this context, Klee appealed to the power of the artist to penetrate the multilayered visibility. For centuries the Balkan artist has been trying to solve the great esthetic and ethical puzzle in front of the walls of Europe: to accept “foreign poetics” at the price of his own originality or to impose his originality at the price of his own “esthetical isolation” from the contemporary European courses!

Reshat Ahmeti too, for a very long period of time persistently and coherently dedicates the larger part of his paintings to the search of a creative solution of the aforementioned dichotomy, but without harming any of the two components: the tradition or the modernity. The Balkan Peninsula with its densely populated geographical and mental relief has presented to the artists as a metaphor of a labyrinth, because of its isolation and imposed borders throughout the history. Reshat Ahmeti believes that the exit from this labyrinth consisted of the primordial streams of human conforming to the natural universe, are the courses of the exit from all the labyrinths and obstacles which are faced up to by the artists while conquering the freedom. With a few moves of his palette, like a triangulation point of the identity of his own Albanian people in the distant past, he fixes the ornaments of magic colors that are going to accompany him in his own fate. His rag-carpets, for example, are part of a dream presented in a contrast to the geometrical coordinates in the reality of his paintings. He succeeds to discover and fix their intensity using the magic of the color (particularly the red and black, then blue, green and their all possible shades), as they were present in the distant memory of his people.

The great Albanian polygraph and European Faik Konitza (during the period when his friend – the great poet of European modernism Guillaume Apollinaire announced the cubism of Picasso and later on the surrealism) in an essay published in French (Essai sur les langues naturelles et artificielles) “An essay on natural and artificial languages” argued that in each natural language (in contrast to the artificial ones) there are obscure( untranslatable zones i.e. untranslatable) words and exactly they are the place where the identity of  people is hidden! Faik Konitza, bearing two identities within his personality, one of which is European (lover of the poetics of the hermetical symbolist Malarmé and the European estheticism) under pseudonyms and the other Albanian, under his native name, deeply involved into the Albanian spiritual revival and representing the paradigm which is to be faced by many artists from the Balkans, sacrificing or yielding their creations to the enigma of the art. The painter Reshat Ahmeti from Macedonia too, solves in his rich and unique paintings his part in the search of “the dark zones” of the identity, discovering the light of the art in his part of the universe limited by his canvases.

Today we live in a civilization dominated by the visual.  Paul Klee was right when he argued that the art does not depict the visible, but it is overwhelmed by the invisible, the void zone, in order one can see behind the visible end behind the borders. But Reshat Ahmeti is superior when convincing us in his canvases that the paradigm that the nature offers all and the painting express the great metamorphoses in the world. The author manages with his art and the harmony between the natural and exact universe to achieve his goal: every single human regardless of his origins and identity to accept as a part of common life- as a homeland.

Luan Starova