Edi Hila’s work has been shown in Paris over the last decade and appeared at the most recent Documenta, yet it is still largely unknown in Western Europe. He paints a paradoxical world, simultaneously disturbing and poetic, marked by dictatorship. The Warsaw contemporary art museum is preparing a career survey, Painter of Transformation (March 2-May 6, 2018).

If a visit to a Documenta or a biennial yields the names of one or two memorable new artists, that already makes it worth the trip. Seen at in Kassel last summer, and especially Athens last spring, where Adam Szymczyk’s segment of Documenta was held, I still remember a series of paintings by Edi Hila. Work by this Albanian painter had already been seen several times in Paris, as part of the exhibition Promesses at the Pompidou Center in 2010, at the Chantal Crousel gallery in a show curated by Anri Sala, and, in 2014, at the Mitterrand gallery, which has represented him since 2008 and is show-casing his work again this winter in the show Tirana-Versailles. We met in Paris shortly before the opening.

PARADOXES

A freighter washed up on a beach with sunbathers right next to it, a child playing billiards in the middle of a forest, an open-air market set up at the foot of a building, largely hiding a statue in front of it… in his paintings Edi Hila shows what he calls the transitory situation in which Albania still remains, a post-dictatorship period pregnant with both a great deal of energy and a kind of madness. He paints paradoxical, sometimes unreal scenes, an indication that our minds do not develop at the same pace as reality. His portraits of houses reflect an absurd world where one can buy a bunker and transform it overnight into a sky-blue palace, round as a birthday cake, pierced by windows that still disturbingly recall the slits through which cannons once poked out. In

Ci-dessus / above: «The Blue House ». 2000. Acrylique sur toile. 131 x 163 cm. Acrylic on canvas Page de droite, de haut en bas / page right, from top:

« Maison n°3 ». 2000. Huile sur toile. 131 x 163 cm.

Oil on canvas

« Penthouse ». 2013. Huile sur toile 120 x 102 cm. Oil on canvas

« Comers ». 2017. Huile sur toile. 135 x 238 cm. (Coll. Musée d’art moderne, Varsovie). Oil on canvas

the face of this spectacle, Hila walks a tightrope between a kind of skepticism that denounces the excesses of a world without restraints and the idea of accepting the present and seeing its bright side, even when it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. One of his paintings where we see buildings painted a pastel pink references a venture by Tirana mayor Edi Rama, himself a recognized Albanian artist, during the first years of democracy, to paint the town with cheerful colors. This was followed by less well-coordinated and successful similar schemes in a few other places scattered around the country. Most often bathed in gray, beige and blue tones, Hila’s paintings convey his disquietude regarding history’s tendency to repeat itself.The Tirana-Versailles series, which motivated Adam Szymczyk and Pierre Bal-Blanc to invite him to show to Documenta in Athens and Kassel respectively, arranges monarchies and dictatorships along the same vague, enhanced perspective avenues lined with tall trees—Louis XIV’s absolute

monarchy, fascism and communism. What remains of all that? How will we remember if we destroy everything, all historical traces, without even thinking about it, as has so often been the case? Two entirely blue canvases show vanished monuments, one the Italianate Tirana city hall demolished by the communists, and the other a Soviet-style pyramid demolished after the fall of the Wall. Painted with a light wash, unlike, for example, the Portraits of Houses, these images are the color of memories. They arise from the void with an unreality that simultaneously suggests Piero della Francesca and the metaphysical painting of Giorgio De Chirico.

CLANDESTINITY

Hila was born in 1944 in one of Albania’s oldest cities, rich with churches and cathedrals. Following the country’s independence in 1912, Skodra was in full effervescence, culturally oriented toward the West. It was home, notably, to numerous photographers; a drawing school opened there in the 1920s. But with the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in 1946, the country began cutting itself off from the world. Unlike Poland, for instance, there was no modernist tradition in Albania. Hila discovered the European avant-gardes in books from the public library. His family and a former Cracow art school professor encouraged him to train himself. The fine arts academy, founded in 1960, began an intransigent defense of socialist realism. In 1973, the regime criticized him because of a painting, Tree Planting, judged to be not in conformity with national ideals. Forced to abandon any public artistic activity, he worked on the docks until the democratic opening in 1992. Many of the drawings he made in secret during those years have survived; some were shown at Documenta. Vividly realistic, they show laborers working and the harshness of daily life. Looking back, he now remarks, “Actually, that was the time when I was the most free, when my work was the most sincere; I felt no constraints then,” in comparison with his present situation as an artist consecrated by cultural officialdom and the art market. Harald Szeemann was the first to discover his work while preparing an exhibition about the Balkans, After the Wall (1999), at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Later came René Block, who included Hila in an exhibition at the Friedricianum in Kassel in 2004. His work during the early years after the fall of the Wall reflected a desire to appropriate Classical and Baroque art, along with popular art, and a certain spiritual dimension. Then his style became simpler, a transformation that led him to where he is today.

FREEDOM

Hila’s work today remains strongly affected by the sense of a permanent threat that pervaded the atmosphere during the years of the dictatorship. It still reflects his country’s social and political structures. The rare human beings seen in his paintings avoid our gaze or even turn their back on us, as if to protect themselves from the violence of the outside world. In recent years he has himself taught at the Tirana fine arts academy, where he helped train a whole generation of Albanian artists, including Anri Sala and Adrian Paci. Good teacher that he is, he says he’s content with protecting them, no longer from the dictatorship but the violence of the world that has followed it. In his series Komfort, the brand name of an Albanian line of cars, he shows objects that have become everyday consumer purchases. The tone often approaches derision. After first reading Jean Baudrillard in 1998, he made a series based onTV screenshots— the Albanian prime minister’s visit to the Vatican, the singer Maria Keri performing for troops, a weather report. Now he no longer draws but instead starts out with Photoshop photomontages. Starting some time ago a new theme has appeared in his paintings: tent camps that these days evoke refugees, scenes of war and exodus. But the series he did for Documenta includes a painting of a folded tent on the roof of his car, a Komfort, no less: an allusion to freedom, the freedom of watching the landscape go by through his automobile window.

Translation, L-S Torgoff