There are many ways to appreciate an artwork or artistic journey.

First, as the history of a visual anthropology that captures the nuances of the artist’s life translated into fragments of epic or routine images, in the illumination of the artistic spirit since the painterly brushstrokes enlighten human history, sometimes in the intimacy of small events, sometimes in the historical clashes of major cultural events.

Secondly, as a detailed aesthetic research of the artist’s relationship with his time, in the refractions of artistic tools, where photography as a historical memory is often intertwined with poetic painting, sequences of national or international iconographic images are reflected in new visual fetishes, building a new cultural dialogue.

According to Guy Debord, “the society of the spectacle, at the dawn of the television era, realized with extraordinary clarity that the real world would be transformed into images, that the spectacle would become the main product of current society”. Communism (the owners of the proletariat) and capitalism (the owners of capital) were but two forms of political regime, one based on the “concentrated spectacular” and the other on the “dispersed spectacular” of consumerism.

And yet Bashkim Dervishi exalts “woman”, her magic, her fragility and at the same time her visual strength in intermediate situations, somewhere in everyday life and somewhere in the stages of art history. He is the Postmodern Adam who follows Eve into the garden of his art presenting us not only the nude female figures but the history itself. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa becomes stronger and more seductive in Dervish’s Nude/Mona Lisa, or Motra Tone (Sister Tone) of Kolë Idromeno gains the power of female fragility in the hidden nudity in Dervishi’s Motra Tone (Sister Tone).

The ambiguity of images of the same image is a concept and a clear artistic state of his by analyzing how the images of a popular culture (Pop Art) affect our daily lives which Andy Warhol highlights “I started repeating the same image because I liked the way the repetition changed the same image. Also, I felt at the time, as I do now, that people can look at and absorb more than one image at a time”.

Each of his brushstrokes is like painting an inner light, a spiritual incandescence, as the artist himself says, according to the simple words of the critic Llambi Blido “in the paintings of Dervishi, the brushstrokes look like neon lights.”

Ph.D. – Assoc. Prof.  ARDIAN ISUFI
Curator