“One of the first lights I remember is candlelight: afraid of the dark, I was clinging to my brother and to my grandmother, Gjyzepina; I remember little about her, but later, from photographs, I could see how beautiful she had been, and I would feel her soul, listening to her opera singing voice on record. When electricity lit up the streetlamps of Tirana, I was awoken in my bunk bed by the warmest kiss of my life, from the lips of Mimosa, as my mother is called, like the flower”.
Endri Kosturi, an enormously talented painter and poet, was born in Tirana (Albania) on October 16, 1980. From an early age he inhabited a world pervaded by multiple creative stimuli, thanks to the influence of a family that included celebrities among its members. His grandmother, Gjyzepina Kosturi Misloca (1912-1985), who studied singing at the Santa Cecilia National Academy in Rome, was a lyric soprano noted for her performances as Violetta in La Traviata, San- tuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana and as Cio-cio-san, the love-sick suicidal geisha (Madame Butterfly)2. His grandfather, Rexhai Kosturi (1905-1968)3, a dilettante painter with high moral virtues, passed his passion for figurative arts onto his grandson.
Kosturi grew up within a “modern” family, intellectually open to contemporary cultural stimuli. He soon showed a real aptitude for painting and for poetry. Like his father, a chemical engineer who saw painting as a hobby, Endri had a predilection for painting galloping horses, a symbol of freedom and vital power. When just five years old, he was admitted to an artistic circle, a sort of afterschool class where some ten children experimented with watercolours and tempera paints. The playful fantasies of the young Endri drew him to innovative themes, like the astronaut on the moon and the spacecraft brandishing the American flag, topics that were not particularly appreciated by the Albanian communist regime due to their strong iconographic and symbolic implications.
Nevertheless, his artistic precociousness did not pass unnoticed in 1980s Albania. In 1987, one of his first large-scale paintings, Spring, was shown at the Galeria Kombetare and Arteve in Tirana. The work is a bucolic reworking of a childhood idyll: a vast green sward carpeted with daisies where free and blithe children chase butterflies and dragonflies with nets. The theme of freedom also inspired the artist’s graphic oeuvre, especially the drawing The Cat and the Mouse on a Tank. Published at the end of the Eighties in a Danish monthly magazine, the outline, in addition to symbolically representing the inner unease and the continually renewed hopes of a child on the threshold of adolescence must be interpreted as the condemnation of nationalist folly. The original form of protest, not without irony, is developed with a great serenity, since Endri’s feelings are put on show with phlegmatic reserve. It lacks all clamour of proclamation, or chromatic violence, but is above all a civilized denunciation that invites us to reflect more deeply on a regime, which at that time was drifting into irreversible decline.
In September 1990, just a few months before the collapse of the communist regime in Albania4, the painter moved to Italy together with his family. As Enzo Driussi recalls: “Being born in Albania and arriving as a child in Italy obliged him, like so many others, to use his elbows to carve out a space for himself to fill out, day after day, with scraps of emotions and experiences that caused him to grow up at great speed. Thousands of sensations he needed to tell, more to himself than to anyone else, first with painting and then with canvases made of flowing words, sometimes light and sometimes as heavy as boulders. Thoughts without restraint that recall disenchanted dreams and harsh realities. Around the world with a suitcase full of sights and discoveries, luggage made of faces, encounters, joys and regrets”5.
After settling in Udine, he pursued his studies at the local Giovanni Sello State Institute for the Arts and continued to apply himself to painting and to graphic and colour experimentations. As can be seen by his works during that period, the painter developed his personal style characterised by an innovative and joyful stylistic pursuit in which he experimented the continuous evolution of lines and colours. Complete control over the visual sign, as Kosturi reminds us, was the greatest achievement, since “by means of the sign it is possible to transcribe the language of the soul”. During his college years, Endri focused on figurative art6, painting still lifes, horses and landscapes in which the colours of the seasons acquired brilliant tones and well-defined outlines. His youthful experiences formed a key part of his personality and his formal language was shaped by an innovative creative process that did not lack, as seen by the light and up-close point of view of his works, references to former great artists. Thus reminding us of Caravaggio (1571-1610)7, of the first Caravagesques8 and Rembrandt’s lesson (1606-1669)9, without overlooking the fascination that the artist had with the Baroque style.
Two years later, he was transfixed by the scratchy brushstrokes and devastating colours of Van Gogh: “his mark that grows within the colour (…) I was fascinated by the way he would repaint the backgrounds of his landscapes”. Charmed by the works of the Dutch painter, Endri concentrated on how to paint rather than on a certain subject, undertaking a continuous evolving artistic career. Starting from 1999 he spent long periods in Paris; in the French capital he deepened his knowledge of the works of Van Gogh and began to gain higher awareness of his own artistic personality. Without yet wholly abandoning his earlier artistic experiments, through his works he exteriorised his no longer containable emotional charge, expressed through the only language that could give his feelings a voice: Art Informel10. The artist was thus drawn to the spontaneity and immediacy of Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)11, the materialistic qualita- tivism of Alberto Burri (1915-1995)12, the psychic abstraction of Tancredi Parmeggiani (1927-1964)13 and, above all, by the humoral chromaticism of Joan Miró (1893-1983)14.
Dragonfly, Kosturi’s first series on a single theme, emerged in 1999. Taking the dragonfly as a subject, as a romantic analogy of human being, the artist rediscovered his first contact with nature and revived his experience in childhood games, while the choice of vibrant colours expressed the complexity of his unconscious.
The following year, his close reading of Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s (1821-1867)15 Le Balcon made a deep impression, and the Balconies cycle emerged as result. The material form of these paintings came up as the symbol of a deep and authentic emotion. The balcony as a subject was charged with multiple nuances and became the element that unites and divides two worlds that tend to oppose each other: the symbol of diversity between the inner world of the individual and the outside world, between consciousness and unconsciousness.
In the summer of 2000 he moved to Frankfurt and found lodgings in Bürgerstraße, the district of the city which had been spared bombardment during the Second World War. Endri was fascinated by the large windows and nineteenth-century pitched roofs of the regional capital of the Rhein- Main, splendid hints of a bygone age. Occupying a spacious, light-filled attic, he began to paint a series of self-portraits interspersed with hearts and dragonflies. However, unexpectedly, the German experience cut short by a lengthy period of hospitalization due to a pneumothorax. Kosturi read Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)16, a key Beat generation author17, leading him down a new inner journey. To have or to be?18, a book by Erich Fromm (1900- 1980) that among other things describes the emotional reaction to seeing a flower, is illuminating when it comes to achieving a synoptic understanding of the expressive philosophy that has guided Kosturi right up to the present. Paraphrasing Jung, Endri stressed how “the process of painting (the painting method used) represents the expressive means”, his interpretation through life, while “the act of painting is the true expression of nature”.
Returning to Udine, he took up innovative techniques to create the series Beat Flowers, inspired by his reading of Kerouac’s San Francisco Blues19. Flowers became a vital symbol of freedom: their initial fragility and subsequent regenerative force. Driussi points out: “Endri Kosturi follows a dream, perhaps a utopia: true freedom, that which sees man and matter in perfect symbiosis, freed in a fantastic flight, without limits, without borders. And that dream is materialized in colours, enforcing an image upon it that becomes a symbol. He makes this dream real by dressing it in colours and endowing it with an image that becomes a symbol. In this way the enchantment of a flower is created that dominates the canvas, changing form and mode of expression”.
Hence a Kosturi in continuous evolution without neglecting new expressive media; he focused on computer art and developed the Beat Flowers in mixed media. Starting out with computer-generated images printed on canvas, he used acrylic colours to put the finishing touches to the work. Flowers were no longer mere decorative elements but, in their naturalism, reminiscent of Caravaggio, acquired a status equal to that of the human figure. The aesthetic originality and intensity of the digital embellishments conferred on the work a substantially different framing from that of the most noted flower painters working in figurative art. Endri was inspired by an innovative resolve to dismantle the genre hierarchy, bringing together the new symbolic values with the magic of the pure artistic vision that records the impressions made by nature and creates a new, higher reality, that of art. The year 2003 marked a turning point. The painter decided to move to London, with his bags packed full of ambition and projects. The city had long held an overwhelming attraction for him, and this decision was a life choice, not made only for his art. His determination to stand out and desire to assert himself were stronger than his apparently hostile destination: “Nothing and no one can close down an idea.” He improvised as a street artist and, with pad and pencil, sketched portraits in Leicester Square. Over the following years he found a stable job as a successful manager and, in the scraps of free time left over from his professional responsibilities, he showed interest in photography. The attainment of security of job and the financial freedoms this entailed allowed him to purchase canvases and paints at will, and above all to set up an independent studio where he could return to artistic production full time. Over the following years the artist tackled the nude figure – having already dealt with the subject in photographs – for the stirring transposition and invention of forms suggested to him by the female figure.
After an idle period, he returned to the theme of the abstract mural, as disclosed by the Wonderwall series (2009-2010): an imaginary wall that the artist sees as being present within, as well as on the outside, of every human being. With Wonderwall, the artist availed for the first time of a layered painting technique and the ritual becomes a method for achieving an emotional level that represents his own personal vision of the macrocosm. The additional application of further layers is the visual representation of states of mind, while the painterly gesture represents the only authentic expression. With the inherent gesture of the works in the Wonderwall series, the artist extracts the colours of truth itself, just as a triangular prism splits light into its components on the colour spectrum.
2010 was the year of Unwiped Windows. This series, which reprises and develops the subject of the window, was presented with a solo exhibition at Lennox Gallery in London, and the show was a public and critical success, one that was repeated in 2011 with the monothematic exhibition Light Within the Shadows. This event, mounted by the architect Robin Monotti, was spread over two floors and functioned as a metaphor for love, which takes shape with passion and determination in the human body, ephemeral and vulnerable as it is. On the ground floor, paintings caught in fishing nets floated suspended in space, introducing and guiding visitors through the artist’s own creative process. A narrow staircase, painted blood red, led to the upper floor, an exhibition space where the colour blue dominated in a dreamlike fashion. The power of dreams coexisted with the physical nature of the work, and the artist arrived at the symbiosis between painted light and the light of photons, between objectively visible light and hidden light: Light From Within, the inner light of Endri Kosturi.
Kosturi grew up within a “modern” family, intellectually open to contemporary cultural stimuli. He soon showed a real aptitude for painting and for poetry. Like his father, a chemical engineer who saw painting as a hobby, Endri had a predilection for painting galloping horses, a symbol of freedom and vital power. When just five years old, he was admitted to an artistic circle, a sort of afterschool class where some ten children experimented with watercolours and tempera paints. The playful fantasies of the young Endri drew him to innovative themes, like the astronaut on the moon and the spacecraft brandishing the American flag, topics that were not particularly appreciated by the Albanian communist regime due to their strong iconographic and symbolic implications.
Nevertheless, his artistic precociousness did not pass unnoticed in 1980s Albania. In 1987, one of his first large-scale paintings, Spring, was shown at the Galeria Kombetare and Arteve in Tirana. The work is a bucolic reworking of a childhood idyll: a vast green sward carpeted with daisies where free and blithe children chase butterflies and dragonflies with nets. The theme of freedom also inspired the artist’s graphic oeuvre, especially the drawing The Cat and the Mouse on a Tank. Published at the end of the Eighties in a Danish monthly magazine, the outline, in addition to symbolically representing the inner unease and the continually renewed hopes of a child on the threshold of adolescence must be interpreted as the condemnation of nationalist folly. The original form of protest, not without irony, is developed with a great serenity, since Endri’s feelings are put on show with phlegmatic reserve. It lacks all clamour of proclamation, or chromatic violence, but is above all a civilized denunciation that invites us to reflect more deeply on a regime, which at that time was drifting into irreversible decline.
In September 1990, just a few months before the collapse of the communist regime in Albania4, the painter moved to Italy together with his family. As Enzo Driussi recalls: “Being born in Albania and arriving as a child in Italy obliged him, like so many others, to use his elbows to carve out a space for himself to fill out, day after day, with scraps of emotions and experiences that caused him to grow up at great speed. Thousands of sensations he needed to tell, more to himself than to anyone else, first with painting and then with canvases made of flowing words, sometimes light and sometimes as heavy as boulders. Thoughts without restraint that recall disenchanted dreams and harsh realities. Around the world with a suitcase full of sights and discoveries, luggage made of faces, encounters, joys and regrets”5.
After settling in Udine, he pursued his studies at the local Giovanni Sello State Institute for the Arts and continued to apply himself to painting and to graphic and colour experimentations. As can be seen by his works during that period, the painter developed his personal style characterised by an innovative and joyful stylistic pursuit in which he experimented the continuous evolution of lines and colours. Complete control over the visual sign, as Kosturi reminds us, was the greatest achievement, since “by means of the sign it is possible to transcribe the language of the soul”. During his college years, Endri focused on figurative art6, painting still lifes, horses and landscapes in which the colours of the seasons acquired brilliant tones and well-defined outlines. His youthful experiences formed a key part of his personality and his formal language was shaped by an innovative creative process that did not lack, as seen by the light and up-close point of view of his works, references to former great artists. Thus reminding us of Caravaggio (1571-1610)7, of the first Caravagesques8 and Rembrandt’s lesson (1606-1669)9, without overlooking the fascination that the artist had with the Baroque style.
Two years later, he was transfixed by the scratchy brushstrokes and devastating colours of Van Gogh: “his mark that grows within the colour (…) I was fascinated by the way he would repaint the backgrounds of his landscapes”. Charmed by the works of the Dutch painter, Endri concentrated on how to paint rather than on a certain subject, undertaking a continuous evolving artistic career. Starting from 1999 he spent long periods in Paris; in the French capital he deepened his knowledge of the works of Van Gogh and began to gain higher awareness of his own artistic personality. Without yet wholly abandoning his earlier artistic experiments, through his works he exteriorised his no longer containable emotional charge, expressed through the only language that could give his feelings a voice: Art Informel10. The artist was thus drawn to the spontaneity and immediacy of Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)11, the materialistic qualita- tivism of Alberto Burri (1915-1995)12, the psychic abstraction of Tancredi Parmeggiani (1927-1964)13 and, above all, by the humoral chromaticism of Joan Miró (1893-1983)14.
Dragonfly, Kosturi’s first series on a single theme, emerged in 1999. Taking the dragonfly as a subject, as a romantic analogy of human being, the artist rediscovered his first contact with nature and revived his experience in childhood games, while the choice of vibrant colours expressed the complexity of his unconscious.
The following year, his close reading of Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s (1821-1867)15 Le Balcon made a deep impression, and the Balconies cycle emerged as result. The material form of these paintings came up as the symbol of a deep and authentic emotion. The balcony as a subject was charged with multiple nuances and became the element that unites and divides two worlds that tend to oppose each other: the symbol of diversity between the inner world of the individual and the outside world, between consciousness and unconsciousness.
In the summer of 2000 he moved to Frankfurt and found lodgings in Bürgerstraße, the district of the city which had been spared bombardment during the Second World War. Endri was fascinated by the large windows and nineteenth-century pitched roofs of the regional capital of the Rhein- Main, splendid hints of a bygone age. Occupying a spacious, light-filled attic, he began to paint a series of self-portraits interspersed with hearts and dragonflies. However, unexpectedly, the German experience cut short by a lengthy period of hospitalization due to a pneumothorax. Kosturi read Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)16, a key Beat generation author17, leading him down a new inner journey. To have or to be?18, a book by Erich Fromm (1900- 1980) that among other things describes the emotional reaction to seeing a flower, is illuminating when it comes to achieving a synoptic understanding of the expressive philosophy that has guided Kosturi right up to the present. Paraphrasing Jung, Endri stressed how “the process of painting (the painting method used) represents the expressive means”, his interpretation through life, while “the act of painting is the true expression of nature”.
Returning to Udine, he took up innovative techniques to create the series Beat Flowers, inspired by his reading of Kerouac’s San Francisco Blues19. Flowers became a vital symbol of freedom: their initial fragility and subsequent regenerative force. Driussi points out: “Endri Kosturi follows a dream, perhaps a utopia: true freedom, that which sees man and matter in perfect symbiosis, freed in a fantastic flight, without limits, without borders. And that dream is materialized in colours, enforcing an image upon it that becomes a symbol. He makes this dream real by dressing it in colours and endowing it with an image that becomes a symbol. In this way the enchantment of a flower is created that dominates the canvas, changing form and mode of expression”.
Hence a Kosturi in continuous evolution without neglecting new expressive media; he focused on computer art and developed the Beat Flowers in mixed media. Starting out with computer-generated images printed on canvas, he used acrylic colours to put the finishing touches to the work. Flowers were no longer mere decorative elements but, in their naturalism, reminiscent of Caravaggio, acquired a status equal to that of the human figure. The aesthetic originality and intensity of the digital embellishments conferred on the work a substantially different framing from that of the most noted flower painters working in figurative art. Endri was inspired by an innovative resolve to dismantle the genre hierarchy, bringing together the new symbolic values with the magic of the pure artistic vision that records the impressions made by nature and creates a new, higher reality, that of art. The year 2003 marked a turning point. The painter decided to move to London, with his bags packed full of ambition and projects. The city had long held an overwhelming attraction for him, and this decision was a life choice, not made only for his art. His determination to stand out and desire to assert himself were stronger than his apparently hostile destination: “Nothing and no one can close down an idea.” He improvised as a street artist and, with pad and pencil, sketched portraits in Leicester Square. Over the following years he found a stable job as a successful manager and, in the scraps of free time left over from his professional responsibilities, he showed interest in photography. The attainment of security of job and the financial freedoms this entailed allowed him to purchase canvases and paints at will, and above all to set up an independent studio where he could return to artistic production full time. Over the following years the artist tackled the nude figure – having already dealt with the subject in photographs – for the stirring transposition and invention of forms suggested to him by the female figure.
After an idle period, he returned to the theme of the abstract mural, as disclosed by the Wonderwall series (2009-2010): an imaginary wall that the artist sees as being present within, as well as on the outside, of every human being. With Wonderwall, the artist availed for the first time of a layered painting technique and the ritual becomes a method for achieving an emotional level that represents his own personal vision of the macrocosm. The additional application of further layers is the visual representation of states of mind, while the painterly gesture represents the only authentic expression. With the inherent gesture of the works in the Wonderwall series, the artist extracts the colours of truth itself, just as a triangular prism splits light into its components on the colour spectrum.
2010 was the year of Unwiped Windows. This series, which reprises and develops the subject of the window, was presented with a solo exhibition at Lennox Gallery in London, and the show was a public and critical success, one that was repeated in 2011 with the monothematic exhibition Light Within the Shadows. This event, mounted by the architect Robin Monotti, was spread over two floors and functioned as a metaphor for love, which takes shape with passion and determination in the human body, ephemeral and vulnerable as it is. On the ground floor, paintings caught in fishing nets floated suspended in space, introducing and guiding visitors through the artist’s own creative process. A narrow staircase, painted blood red, led to the upper floor, an exhibition space where the colour blue dominated in a dreamlike fashion. The power of dreams coexisted with the physical nature of the work, and the artist arrived at the symbiosis between painted light and the light of photons, between objectively visible light and hidden light: Light From Within, the inner light of Endri Kosturi.
Andrea Comari 2012
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