Artan Shalsi
Notes on the work
On the icons of Berat, the threshold of visibility, the red on the back of each work, folded steel, and a project called Carbonio.
Berat
I grew up in a country where religion had been removed from public life. Albania was the only officially atheist state in the world. Prayer was forbidden, and like everyone my age I grew up with no direct experience of religious life. We knew priests from films.
The churches were still standing, but most of them had become museums of traditional culture: places where you went to admire the skill of craftsmen from earlier centuries.
In my home town there is the Onufri National Icon Museum. I went there as a child, and I still remember the feeling exactly. I was almost afraid of the icons. The eyes of the saints seemed to follow me. Those dark faces, not entirely human, seemed to belong to another world.
Later I studied art history and understood what an icon is. I made a few myself, which taught me more than reading did.
An icon is not a painted surface. It is an object: the prepared panel, the ornament, the gold leaf, the bronze or the silver, the stones set into it. It is rich, luminous, precious. It does not try to go unnoticed. Everything in it works towards being seen.
Where the work comes from
Many years later I came across the Fayum mummy portraits, and they stayed with me.
Then there was art school. The training was classical, almost nineteenth-century academic, shaped by Russian influence and through it by the European tradition, and aimed at producing artists for socialist realism. We spent countless hours on portraits and studies of the human figure, mostly in graphite on paper. Drawing in graphite was considered the foundation of an artist's education — not for technical reasons, but because taking colour away makes you understand structure.
I still keep many of those drawings.
And then something changed outside the studio. With smartphones and social media we entered a condition of visual excess. We are exposed to more images than our capacity to look can absorb.
Out of that collapse the idea slowly assembled itself: to make a work that does not show itself immediately. That is not consumed at the first glance.
Like the thousands of images we scroll past every day, the viewer of my work can decide to move on. But if a minimum of patience and attention remains, something begins to appear.
At first you see a white rectangle. If you stay, if you change your position and look at the detail, the image slowly emerges. The more time you give it, the more there is to see.
So I think of these works as icons in the original Greek sense of the word — and at the same time as the exact opposite of the religious icon. In Onufri's Christ Pantokrator, which I saw as a child in Berat, everything is present and open: the penetrating gaze, the luminous ground, the precious materials. In my work everything moves towards reduction. Everything approaches white.
White as the sum of all colours. As the sum of all thoughts.
Why two per cent
After many attempts I became convinced that two per cent is the minimum threshold of visibility. It is the least presence necessary for something to continue to exist in front of our eyes, while still demanding time, attention and willingness in order to be seen.
The text, or the face, is not refused. It is withheld.
At one per cent the work would practically disappear. It would become purely conceptual and move onto another plane, where perception no longer matters and only the idea remains. I have explored that direction, and perhaps this research will eventually move towards a complete dissolution of the image. For now the work stays in the space between presence and disappearance.
I learned where that boundary lies partly by accident. People came to the exhibition, walked past the large white rectangles, saw nothing, and left disappointed.
At five per cent the work loses its ground. The image becomes too visible, it offers itself immediately — and exactly the slowing down I am after disappears.
How the work is made
Technically, the two per cent is a transparency I apply to an image before it is printed.
I began with printing. Today I have gone back to drawing freehand on the reverse of the plexiglass, as I already did with the text works. That step matters to me: it gives the work greater credibility and a stronger connection to my own history. Graphite brings back the time of the hand. The time of drawing. The time of my own training.
The image is printed on transparent cellulose, backed with a PVC film, and fixed to the reverse of a three-millimetre plexiglass sheet. The front of the plexiglass is then abraded, so that no visible or tactile memory of the industrial material remains. The surface changes completely. It becomes almost stone, almost marble, to the eye and to the hand.
The portraits I choose have no personal or emotional significance in the classical sense. I choose them out of my own aesthetic conviction, and then work on the image digitally to strengthen the contrast between light and dark, until it holds the tension between visibility and withholding that the work needs.
The red on the back
Old icons were made on wooden panels. The centre of the panel was hollowed out, leaving a raised edge like a frame. That edge was often painted red, and often the same colour was carried onto the back of the panel.
In the cathedral inside the castle of Berat, the baptistery lies behind the iconostasis — a situation that is rare in Orthodox architecture. Visitors could therefore pass through the deacons' doors and see the backs of the icons.
I remember that other viewpoint very clearly. Not the solemn front of the sacred image, but the hidden structure of the object: the carved wood, the surface of the support, the traces of making. Sometimes the wood was dark. Sometimes it still carried red.
That is where the idea came from to lift my own icons off the wall and let the hidden side be seen.
I paint these backs red, deliberately not perfectly. The brushmarks stay visible. The surface keeps the movement of the hand and the materiality of the paint. The red is not decoration. It is a material presence.
Then something happened that I had not planned. Once the works were held away from the wall, the red began to reflect onto it and produced a red glow around the white rectangle. That effect was not designed. But precisely that accidental element interested me — and the back, which had seemed to be a technical detail, became part of the room and part of the viewer's perception.
The words
I am not a poet, not a writer, not a man of letters. My aim is not to make literary texts. The sentence is one of the elements a visual work is built from.
I imagine these texts as small fragments of torn-out pages that you find by chance, pages that might belong to an imaginary novel. They deliberately carry a certain ambiguity, and sometimes a tension. They have no real beginning and no final end. They are like a single frame of a film: a fragment of a scene, of an action that has already begun and continues outside the image.
They tell nothing completely. They leave an open space. I imagine that in reading the text, the viewer projects their own scene into the white rectangle of the work. The words do not produce a finished image. They open a space in which an image can form inside the person looking.
Folds
I trained as a sculptor, and material is my fundamental starting point.
My research into folds came out of the drapery of classical Greek and Renaissance sculpture, and above all the work of Phidias and Praxiteles. Studying drapery was a central part of our training. What always fascinated me is how a soft material like cloth can become a structure through form, movement and tension.
I tried to carry that historical memory into a contemporary language. The soft folds of the past become straight, broken, rhythmic, minimal lines — in stainless steel, Cor-Ten and aluminium, materials that seem to me to carry the character of our own period.
The return to the face is therefore not a turning away from material. It is another way of thinking about presence.
The workshop
The mechanical workshop where I realise my work has never been only a place of production. It became a place of research and experiment. I discovered many materials there, and many technical solutions came out of talking directly to people who handle those materials every day.
Few artists have heavy machinery in their own studio, and having access to it changes the way you think about a work. When you work directly with industrial materials, at scale, matter is no longer an abstract idea. It resists. It asks questions. It proposes solutions.
So the workshop is not the place where a finished concept gets carried out. It is a space where the idea meets matter and can be changed by the encounter. Sometimes, out of that resistance, something appears that was not yet fully present in the original thought.
Germany, 1997
The early nineties were years of radical change for Albanian society. The collapse of the totalitarian system brought a sudden opening in many areas of life, and with it great uncertainty and instability. It culminated in the extraordinary and absurd year 1997.
To describe that feeling in a few words, I think of a line from Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday: witness to the most terrible collapse of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality.
Those years marked me deeply as a young man and influenced my work. They changed the way I look at the world.
Leaving Albania was, for an artist who wanted to know the contemporary art world directly and not only through books and reproductions, a natural decision. Germany was my first real contact with that culture.
What struck me was the strong presence of the present. You could feel it everywhere, above all in the architecture — and I was surprised by the positive unselfconsciousness with which historic and contemporary building were placed next to one another. Not as opposition, but as dialogue.
And then the museums. There I saw many works and many artists for the first time in reality, which until then I had known only from books, catalogues and reproductions. Seeing a work in front of you always means something different from knowing it through a reproduction. The real space, the scale, the material and your own physical presence change the perception.
Carbonio
I keep many projects for a long time, with a certain reserve, before they become real. For me a project is not only an image or an idea. It is a process that has to find the right conditions in order to become a work.
CARBONIO. l'arché (ἀρχή) is one of these. It is a large work in graphite, charcoal and brass on canvas paper, 804 × 285 cm. The dimensions are exactly those of Raphael's preparatory cartoon for The School of Athens, held at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. That reference is not a purely formal homage: what interests me is the spatial and conceptual dimension of that work — the possibility of creating a visual environment that takes the viewer in completely.
Graphite is not only a technical choice. It is an allotrope of carbon, and for me it carries a strong conceptual meaning. It is a material that has accompanied my whole path and to which I have an almost physical relationship. The paper matters too: it will be made of several sheets joined and mounted on a light cotton fabric. That has a technical function, because it makes the large format stable, and it carries a personal memory — it reminds me of the school sheets of my childhood.
The central subject of the work is war. But I do not want to show war through a direct representation of violence or through recognisable scenes. What interests me is what remains after the destruction.
There is no living figure inside the work. Human life is absent, as if it had been destroyed by an explosion and returned to its original form: back to the arché, to the beginning. Carbon returns to its elementary state, a matter distributed through space, a dust that darkens the light.
It is that paradoxical cycle that holds me. Destruction returns matter to its origin. What everything comes from is also what everything returns to.
What remains
Looking back, I recognise that many images and experiences from my childhood live on in my work, but in a changed form.
It is not nostalgia. What interests me is how memory goes on acting in the present and can take a new form.
The icons of my childhood, the classical training, the graphite pencil from art school, the industrial materials of the present: elements that seem far apart from one another have, over time, found a common space.
Perhaps my work comes precisely out of this constant dialogue. Between what stays and what changes. Between presence and absence. Between matter and thought. Between what we see and what we still have to learn to see.