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Adrian Paci
Friends, 2020enquire
"My relationship with painting started in Albania during the communist regime. The only possible art, back then, was Socialist Realism. You needed to know the traditional art and you had to embrace the ideology of the communist party, whose goal was the creation of the new man."
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Adrian Paci
The Procession, 2018enquire
"Art was an instrument to convey ideology to the masses. Surely every artistic expression, also if oppressed, is searching its own way of deviation, if not to manifest open dissent. My father, who was a painter, taught me to distinguish between the stiffness of the official art and the freshness of a glance less contaminated by the heroic optimism of the regime art.”
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Adrian Paci
The Procession, 2018enquire
"In 1997, Albania was in the hands of armed gangs and of the international task forces. The fall of the regime in 1991 had provoked a severe trauma but the feelings were positive; instead this new breakdown was without hope, and escaping seemed to be the only way out.”
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Adrian Paci
Albanian Stories, 1997enquire
“Albanian Stories had its origin in this climate. It represents the experience of life overwhelmed by a violent transformation, but also an artistic practice that gets rid of what was known before — of the inertia of a pre-existing codification — and becomes instead the witness of a narration in which fiction and reality, game and trauma, fragility and the force of fantasy intertwine.”
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Adrian Paci
Untitled, 2020enquire
“Before that, I had never touched a camera; but this video has changed my way to do art in a radical way. Instead of the artwork generated by a thought which becomes language, here what determines the work is an unexpected encounter, a wonder. The author gives way to the witness.”
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Adrian Paci
Untitled, 2019enquire
"It had already been a while that contemporary painting had overcome the battle between figurative and abstract. Hence the figure, the image and the narration are part of my practice not as a return to the past, but with the simplicity of a now that is captured by the awe towards the potential which these moving images represent as a whole.”
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Adrian Paci
Untitled (Pasolini), 2019enquire
"This spontaneous experience with the video has relaxed my relationship with painting. Painting didn’t need to take on the burden of a weighty task, of a stylistic positioning or of a technical virtuosity, but it could dissolve into the same attitude, that of being a witness in an encounter. And this encounter took place with the moving images."
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Adrian Paci
Medea, 2019enquire
"The moving images which I work with in painting come from sources that I haven’t filmed myself. On one side they are already framed and on the other their flow offers the possibility to intervene and to fixate them in a transient moment in which a suggestive balance emerges."
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Adrian Paci
Untitled, 2014enquire
"In this way, the image opens itself to the painterly possibility, entering into a new context both of interpretation and of physical transformation. Videos from weddings and rituals in Albania, film d’auteur, documentaries – they all enter a different territory where most certainly they lose something and they also gain something new and unexpected.”
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"There are recurring elements: a continuous human presence, moments of daily life, bodies which become images, ghostly presences, and from these images they become works on paper, canvas, plaster or sometimes marble as pieces of a mosaic. What remains in these passages is the sense of a vibration, of a phase shift and of an enigma that doesn’t need any mystifying veil, but whose presence is also confirmed through the luminous transparence of the images. I am not trying to affirm and celebrate the image but to witness its otherness, its being simultaneously familiar and strange."
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Adrian Paci
Untitled, 2020enquire
"The art work that is generated doesn’t want to celebrate the image which it encountered but to elaborate its enigma, facing it inch by inch, through the body of painting itself. In this way transforming an existing image into a painting becomes like reading aloud an existing text. You do it through your timbre which is suggested by the images themselves but which is pronounced through the particularity of the pictorial voice.”
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Adrian Paci
Untitled, 2019enquire
"Obviously, there is always a subjective gaze in front of the images that capture this potentiality and there is a personal touch of the hand that leaves the traces. But the presence of the author tends to be light and delicate in order to keep the central space for the quality and the enigma of the images.”
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"Painting, like art in general, is not a question of good intentions; if anything it is a question of intensity. Good intentions can be explained, they may or may not convince you, they may be appreciated or not, but intensity excites you and sweeps you away.”
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Adrian Paci
Untitled, 2020sold
"But touching this territory means entering into a zone that it is not only unsayable but also unthinkable. Achieving consciousness about your work coincides unfortunately with violating this zone, provoking the decrease of that intensity without which art remains mere decoration or pure discourse.”
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Adrian Paci
Untitled, 2020sold
"Actually, maybe the moment has come for me to respect this zone of silence and stop myself from adding more words that keep violating it."
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Adrian Paci (b. 1969 in Shkodër, Albania) lives and works between Milan and Shkodër, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at kaufmann repetto, New York, in 2021.
Throughout his career he held numerous solo shows in various international institutions such as: Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2019); National Gallery of Art, Tirana (2019); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburger (2019); Museo Novecento, Florence (2018); Chiostri di Sant'Eustorgio, Milan (2017); MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2015); Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Norway (2014); MAC - Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal (2014); PAC - Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2014); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2013); Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich (2010); Bloomberg Space, London (2010); CCA - The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2009); MoMA PS1, New York (2006); and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005), among others. Amongst the various group shows, Adrian Paci's work has also been featured in the 14th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia (2014); in the 48th and the 51st edition of the International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia (respectively in 1999 and 2005); in the 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006); in the 15th Quadriennale di Roma, where he won first prize (2008); in the Biennale de Lyon (2009); and in the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013). Adrian Paci's work is held in the collections of Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fundaciò La Caixa, Barcelona; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, among others.
*All text included in this online viewing room are from an essay titled The Simplicity of Now, written by Adrian Paci during summer 2020.
Click here to read the entire essay
Adrian Paci the simplicity of now
Past viewing_room
