When The Memories Gain Color
Reception for the Artists on Friday, October 2nd from 6 to 8 pm
“When the memories gain color”
Exhibition Dates: October 2 – 9, 2026
Artists exhibiting: Agron Abduli, Burim Ukici and Berat Beqiri
Agron Abduli
Agron Abduli is a painter and lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Tetova.
Throughout his academic training and later, Agron has maintained an affective relationship with the genre of portraiture and this genre will be precisely the beginning, the forming magma of his creativity.
His work has a conceptual continuity that has been consolidated over time and has clearly defined the artistic profile of the author.
It breathes within a healthy pictorial environment and narrates the invisible threads of communication between the figure/portrait and its reduction, the author’s aspiration or inclination to overcome the limit of figurative expression and to seek another distinctive identity, a more reduced and abstract style to the extent that the heads and faces lose their distinctive features and shapes, become elongated and transformed to the extent that they are hardly recognizable as heads or portraits.
Agron has built a very personal meditative and analytical system to narrate what happens inside him, to translate into painting images of realities that weigh on his feelings and consciousness. By making an x-ray of the human being and thus penetrating deeply into its sensitivity, Agron, through his paintings, brings portraits/faces of troubled people with slow eyes, full of sadness and anxiety that reflect the nature of a troubled time, the tense drama of the individual.
His paintings resemble echoes submerged in the emptiness of an invisible interior.
They form a cycle, a single phrase, but are independent of each other. They live alone, within a scenario that has no beginning and end, but consists of a multitude of reference points that interfere with each other.
In the coloristic treatment, Agron is generally restrained. He is inclined towards graphic solutions, moving towards almost graphic tableaux, backgrounds dominated by dark tones.
His painting goes and weighs on black teal. The “strokes” of color are controlled and seek to bring out from the shadow the subtle drama that remains hidden from the eyes of others.
The technique of constructing paintings with simple surfaces, with a soft monochrome and controlled contrasts is very important because it begins and becomes deeply contained.
The artistic language and subject of Agron’s works require an artistic culture, meditation and concentration. His painting comes as a personal experience and goes beyond the initial idea that conceived it.
This cycle, this corpus of works built painting after painting, consolidated over time, has its source in the deep and serious research that the author does on his subject.
Prof.Ord. Nora HALIMI
Burim Ukici
If we start from the definition that line, form and color are those elements that have to do with painting, which does not imitate nature, but presents it as a reality in itself, these artistic elements do not completely avoid the object (figuration), but give the image a form with new content. It seems that the painter, Burim Ukici, a name now more proven in the art scene and beyond, who continues to enrich and consolidate his abstraction stylistically and aesthetically, acts similarly in his paintings uses the cohesion of solutions in the coordination of the forms of specific images and new meanings (meanings) within the paintings of this stylistic provenance. This is evidenced, especially, by the works of recent years, where Ukici uses almost in parallel a series of approaches during the abstract creative process: abstract, expressive, constructive (geometric), concrete, formal and semiotic. Moreover, he continues to give form to the content, while giving color to the abstraction. So, his painting does not adhere to just one, but rather (sub)variants of abstraction.The action in his paintings, the painter Burim Ukici, usually places on a background with various colors, which, with the transparency of their layers, substrates or stains, highlight the infinity of creative imagination, but, at the same time, without violating the two-dimensionality of the compositional assemblies.The colors in these works, as warm as they are cold, or as calm and as dynamic. Even in this contingent of paintings, the following continue to dominate: red, gray, blue, yellow, pink, which constitute a somewhat more pasty texture of colors on the canvas.. But, along with the color in expression, comes the search for figuration and especially the elaboration of symbols which, sometimes appear as allusive (similar) visual signs, and sometimes as iconic (non-iconic) images. The presentation of people’s faces, some more transparent and some more camouflaged, also imbued with neo-expressionist and neo-figuralist experiences, reveal the psychology of the bewildered and sad cubo-surrealist portraits. Over time, this allusive manner softens and transforms the figure to an associative extent, which with all its expressiveness and organic character, outlines a new ideo-aesthetic poetics in his paintings. Or to put it differently, his painting tends towards a variant of biomorphic abstraction, whose main characteristic is the stylization of natural forms translated into art. All those Therefore, in conclusion, it can be concluded that, although the artistic language of Burim Ukiçi, at first glance, sounds like something seen, consumed, or something closed, nevertheless, it finds its place in the shelter of the postmodern universe, in which an eternal symbiosis of what is seen, heard, and experienced is created. So, being in a constant effort to discover sensory truth, this painter clearly expresses his attitude towards open possibilities, in which nothing is assumed and predetermined, and that his only final result is the spontaneity that evolves with each of his new paintings.
Mixhait POLLOZHANI
Berat Beqiri
Carried in the memory of the young with a combination of time and space, through professional experiments and the acquisition of graphic techniques, the creators are in search of their creative individuality. Through the explosive force of the interpretation of subjects from folklore, ethnological elements and national tradition, they are taking the first steps on the professional path where the works have their starting point, to testify to the aspirations and intended artistic messages.
As Arnold Hauser has emphasized, “The integration of the past into the present is the essential seal of historical development,” so too does the present have its own past, its own tradition, which, by being constantly rebuilt, gains new significance and values. Intentionally or unintentionally, it is emotionally and visually connected to its environment or past, which is noticeable in the works of artists.
In Berati’s works, the dominant motif is the landscape motif, intertwined with the magic of trees, rocks and the powerful diversity of their branches, “playing” with color, creating graphic contrasts and visual creations. His graphic works, by unifying the theme, motif and style, present the beautiful views of the nature of his birthplace, while through the experience of contemporary eclecticism, he builds a series of subjects with a clear artistic message.
Finally, it can be said that the creators in question carrying authentic values raised on symbols, metaphors, associations, intersections of real and unreal, today and yesterday, cloud and old, manage to produce an impressive “artistic space.” They prove at the same time that they are on the right track to become serious creators and with special encouragement to convey their graphic knowledge to the next flows. We remain hopeful that their next presentation will not take long
Dr. JËLLDËZ ASANI
Art Historian
