Arjan Shehaj | PATOS
From 23/06/2022 To 08/09/2022
Of peripatetic origin, the Greek word pathos indicates together that sense of passion and excitement typical of tragedy. However, the modern evolution of this term places the emphasis above all on the ability of a work of art to simultaneously arouse emotion and aesthetic sharing in the viewer. Such a result is the result of an unrepeatable mixture of feelings that also rhyme with the primitive etymological sense of the word pathos, that is, the one that refers to suffering. Yet this swirling and changing effect, or rather its triggering substrate, remains in a liminal place that harmoniously interposes itself between the work and the viewer, an indefinite and diaphanous tangle that involves all the elements in play. And so the vortex finds its geometric circle, the dog begins to bite its tail and the structural thread of everything finds its meaning in an exhaustive and perpetual way.
Let's start from the birthplace of the artist in question, namely Patos, an Albanian municipality located in the prefecture of Fier, a receptacle of tragic influences characteristic of the aforementioned word, from which the almost obsessive artistic investigation took hold, becoming its undisputed matrix, connoting it even the extremely evolutionary color scheme of Arjan Shehaj, consisting of the search for the structure of being, the bare and evanescent essence of everything. By being he means only and exclusively that two-way line that runs indissolubly between reality and human perception. The line is imperceptible and immeasurable, beyond any spatial categorization, it seems that Shehaj makes fun of space and time as his works appear to slide on these coordinates, crossing them with extreme ease and in a rhythmic manner, and in so doing. he holds them in his hand. Don't these knots elusive to a space-time location seem to whisper the possible form of that liminal and complex pathos, the fruit of blood extracted from the profound essence of reality and of airy lightness of existence?
The answer is found in these works, created by an "intuitive reason" emancipated from the force of earth's gravity, with an allegorically both holographic and anthropometric vocation, centered on pure, unreflective and free forms with a geometric basis and which, in the last resort, present themselves as magnificently encephalic and labyrinthine reticular fibers from which a disturbing energy emerges and whose power, typical of shapeless matter, allows things to take on formal reality with great strength and vigor, since, as Kazimir Severinovič Malevič, Russian painter and founder of Suprematist current: "art is not concerned with serving the State and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of customs, it no longer wants to have anything to do with the object, as such, and believe that it can exist , in and of itself ".