Nehat Beqiri
Nehat Beqiri
October 20th, 2008
Opening Reception from 6 to 9 pm.
Painting under the brush of Nehat Beqiri continues to be vivid and startling. His recent artworks put us in front of the inner gallery of an artist. If observed in the absence of preconceived ideas and opinions, one gets the impression that these works are mostly about…paint. Paint consisted of lines, color and compositional strength. As if all he needs are frames, canvases, paint and brushes.
Nevertheless, the structural and dynamic conception of the paintings require both analytical and meditative configuration, artistic and psychological one.
These paintings transcend a common spirit in the series that the artist has been preoccupied with the last few years.
Idiosyncratic, as most of Beqiri’s works they fulfill his autobiography through images.
The poll of his scrutiny dives inside the artists into the matrix of his mind where the roots of emotions, thoughts, ideas, dreams…lie.
The transcription of this matrix is typed on canvas. Here he demands to materialize the lived experience into a plastic one, the world of feelings into a world of cognition. It is the picture frame where he succeeds to dissolve time and himself and where his figurative language: the power of thought, the freedom of imagination, experience, intuition and emotional memory thrives.
The symbolic and poetic treatment, the vitality of color and intuitive composition of his paintings opens the door for us to peak into his intellectual and emotional sky.
The concept of the paintings is based on the repetition of ambivalent signs and symbols full with abstract and suggestive associations that enable a range of interpretative possibilities.
In spite of the repetitive strategy that Beqiri utilizes while speaking to us with signs and symbols like circles, X, parallel lines and fluid color marks, each painting has its own rhythm and vitality.
They provoke in our mental screen metaphorical images, they drive us from one symbolism to another while experiencing numerous bursts from the diverse and rich specter of human emotions. Although all his paintings are individualistic in nature, the artist creates the sense that some of them perform musical pieces, jazz rhythms which are transmitted through colors and forms. In certain paintings he visualizes the age-old game scheme of tic tac toe (or knot and crosses), a game which looks like it’s played out between the artist himself and the canvas which always results in a tie. No victory or defeat. If there is victory or defeat the players would have nothing to say to each other anymore, so he takes another canvas and plays the game again. With this game scheme he reduces some of the paintings to the level of black and white, a contrast which represents the basic duality of existence and therefore, enables the game to go on.
The use of these symbols outside the tic tac toe paintings accumulates different meanings. The compositions of all his paintings are opened and convulsive, which in turn create the illusion of an uninterrupted space that continues outside the painting’s frame.
The line, once drawn with subtlety and thought, explodes with energy and emotions in the next, constantly permeating its sovereignty even while overriding color forms. The artist in this case makes use of the line to create parallels that evoke the sense of reaching the infinity without ever uniting.
The color is a strong element of Beqiri’s work as well. In his paintings color lives as a symbolic form, besides the plastic value it inherently carries it slowly, but boldly, enters the world of the abstract mark. Creating harmony and pronouncedly suggestive contrasts, the color always refers to an atmosphere of change and vividness.
In the calm before the storm, Beqiri can also through color on canvas as if he was snap shooting pieces of purple skies and dreams; abstract exaltations that evoke sunset moods of big cities, grasping with mastery and unique spontaneity the atmosphere of that inevitable surrender of the day into night.
The artist’s fragility in traumatic events is blindingly visible in Beqiri’s paintings while inexorably offering proof of the immense tragic volume of human endurance and potential. In such a delicate conquest the artist also tries to reflect on one of the most hideous tragedies of this century – September 11.
His internal imperatives are diverse and manifest outwardly in numerous facets, creating a fertile ground for different interpretations.
It so happens that sometimes the thoughts and emotions contradict each other in a forehead crash, but that doesn’t frighten the artist, and neither the interpretations (like this one) it only revives him, for he knows human nature and his works are those standing in front of its crushing wave.
