Eroticommunism

Prometeogallery by Ida Pisani wishes to present Eroticommunism, the first retrospective of artist Iva Lulashi (Tirana, 1988).

The paintings here exhibited – realised by the artist for this event – form a visual itinerary skilfully crafted that unveils through personal thought and collective dimension, the public and the private, politics, society, and desire. At the same time, she proves to have knowledge of the international masters of painting, whose influences are deeply engrained in her canvases. These are blended together to perfection with the artistic tradition of her home country, Albania. These two features are synthesised to create her peculiar style of painting. A style that favours subtle traits, a delicate sfumato, almost “out of focus”, which contemplates the force of images and of the medium and frees itself from documentary significance and from references to reality, in order to offer a privileged point of view – almost voyeuristic – to the onlooker.

Lulashi develops a creative and strongly ethical and political pictorial process that mutates into an aesthetic strategy aimed at a critique of the pervasive mount of images that from the media and drown our senses daily.

Each painting is a testimony of a fight against the visual stereotypes presented by the media. At the same time, they denounce the control and brainwashing that the political and economic power has on the personal sphere (whether of thought, gender, morals, customs, and behaviours), operated through images and their massive spreading.

The artist harmoniously mixes her biographic dimension, through tales and her family’s memory, with that of a universal consideration; more importantly, she succeeds in creating a functioning dialectic where politics – the communism appearing in the title – is woven with the more private dimension of the Self, eroticism. In the artist’s poetics, eroticism represents the last banner symbolising the defence of free will, individual freedom, and respect of differences.

Lulashi developed an extremely personal creative process, which sees her prevailing on the mediatic flux (documentaries, films, ads, etc.), and in particular on the audio-visual production of 1960s and 1970s Albania, images that she translates into powerful devices through painting, and that force the viewer to introspection.

Lulashi’s painting is an instrument of historical and individual reflection; as she questions the past, she ponders on the present, and on her role as a “primitive” expressive medium in the era of high-tech.

Exhibiton catalogue available with texts by Rischa Paterlini and Carlo Sala.