On Thursday, April 6th, 2023 Harabel had the pleasure to inaugurate “The Curse of the Eye”, an exhibiton by artist Genti Korini, curated by Maria Rus Bojan, at Harabel Exhibition Space.

Among the leading artists of his generation, Genti Korini has articulated an original conceptual language that lies at the intersection between representation and abstraction, formalism and social commentary, media and design. Inspired by the history of painting and modernist architecture, Korini’s work emphasizes the relationship between aesthetics and social imagination, exploring how these elements are manifested in the juxtaposition of modernity with modernism with the cultural and historical framework of his native country Albania.

After the experience of capturing in pictorial representations elements of an abstracted reality affected by modernist architecture, the artist expanded his area of expression by switching recently to figuration. With a higher potential in describing the complexity of contemporary representation, figuration becomes for Korini a conceptual tool to play with the certainties of perception, while questioning at the same time its rules and prejudices.

The recent series of figurative paintings engages with the ideas of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who define fashion as a template of contemporaneity, a societal matrix constantly seeking for what he calls the “ontology of style”.

His semiotic adventure of decoding the meta-language of fashion contained in the contemporary representations proliferated by social platforms is both intriguing and useful. It presents possibilities to discern between the various narratives that express collective cultural values and critically addresses the very process of constructing identity through image and fashionable props as well as the new imperative of self-expression, which became the new mantra of social media.

Pointing to those aspects of discontinuity between reality and the projection of style, Korini creates hybrid characters that function as proxies, as empty narratives in a state of alienation and hybridity, reduced to their act of the pose as form without content as abstractions. In all the compositions from the new series gathered under the title “The Curse of the Eye” the artist’s emphasis is always on the staged pose – not on the portrayed figure, while the abstraction in the background with its culturally charged elements is meant to support the association between the narratives.

Seizing that each visual representation has an “underside” in which seemingly intelligible forms lose their clarity and defy rational understanding, the artist aims to create windows into particular moments in time, reflecting on the recent transformation of cultural values and the implicit changes that are brought along.

Fusing old and new iconographies, but without giving any clear resolution, the artist questions the ways in which the representation of the body has been used to construct and reinforce dominant cultural narratives.

“The Curse of the Eye” takes on a hermeneutic approach that significantly contributes to broadening the knowledge and the implications of the study of these new projections of identity offering a code of interpretation and hence a new reading of the many layers contained within the visual contemporary representation.

Maria Rus Bojan