“Suspended” is the personal exhibition of artist Blerta Xhomo, curated by Vladimir Myrtezai, opened at the “FAB” gallery in Tirana, January 6th – 16th, 2020.
There are several cycles through which the author chooses to express her worldview and the sensitivity with which she experiences everything that happens and surrounds her. The connection, visible between the cycles, is mainly made of colors: white, blue and purple – conspicuous for their coldness, perhaps as a kind of indication of the author’s impartiality in the topics she touches on, perhaps as a kind of testimony of not affecting (the viewer’s) reason through feeling. The topics that the author develops include, among other things: the effort, departure / resistance, self-sacrifice and triumph, during the elaboration of which the escape from the self to the common and vice versa is one of the most striking features. Both man and the community, equally, stand out in this journey, but with such an elaboration that the protagonist has no features (hero / heroine), so, he / she can easily be identified as one of us.
Despite the variety of themes, from the beginning to the end, the beings breathing in the works in question are united by suspense. The cycles that carry this title, (“Suspended”) are those which clearly represent the trajectory of the rise and fall and vice versa of the gender representatives of human race , man and woman. Besides that, Blerta Xhomo’s silhouettes are lucid in their consciousness, though often in despair. Their bending, kneeling, and in all their bodily refraction there is excessive hardship. However, they represent the exhausted man but not the defeated man.
Blerta Xhomo’s characters, also come from antiquity. Amid contemporary chaos and personal overexertion, today’s Prometheus has his own struggles, withstanding the difficulty of transmitting light, whose presence can be felt throughout the exhibition through the use of white; likewise, throughout the staggering layer of modernity, a female particle blushes and seduces like the embryo of something beginning from ground zero. But all this comes as a stream, not as a narrative, in the exhibition: the artist avoids it, (the narrative) because for her it is not a priority who the subject is, what his outward appearance is, to what era of human development he belongs to. What is important, is the state he is in, the sensation. Causes that disorient a person do not take precedence. The most precious is the vitality with which he decides to rise endlessly over and over again, from his beginnings.
* Blerta Xhomo completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts (Tirana), in painting, specializing in graphics (1987-1991). She has been awarded first prize as a painter at the 10th Albanian Film Festival (“Lonely Giant”, 1995), as well as at the 13th “International Panorama of Independent Filmarker” festival in Patras, Greece (“Freedom of the World”). Great ”, 2012). She was also awarded at the international exhibition WAART Contemporary Award for Strong Art (2013).
Her personal exhibitions are : “Balkan Week”, Apollo (2009); “Transcendence as a Body of Mind”, FAB Gallery, Tirana (2015); “Traveling”, National Library, Prishtina, (2016). Joint exhibitions (Albania): “Onufri”, Tirana (1991); “Portrait”, “Art Space Gallery”, Tirana (2013); “Expo Art Tirana” (2016, 2018), “Generations” (2016), “La solitudine dell angelo” (2019), National History Museum, Tirana. Joint exhibitions (Italy): “L’identita Albaneze”, Noto (2012); “Award for Art”, Casole D’Elsa (2012); “Mediterraneo di WART”, Florence (2013); “International Contemporary in WART”, Florence (2013); “Il labirinto Dell’ipnotista”, Como (2016); Casole D’elsa’s “WARD Fort Art”, Siena (2016), as well as the “G. Gallery” Boccaccio ”, Certaldo (1991) and at the“ Medici Riccardi ”palace, Florence.
