Lateral Geometries

“Anri, tell me the truth. Tell me that this city does not exist. Please tell me that you do not have an artist-Mayor friend?”, was the rhetorical question that artist Liam Gillik addressed to Anri Sala, apparently reflecting a state of dubitative anticipation, highlightning perfectly the window of opportunity created through the proposals of the mayor, Edi Rama, to revitalize the urban space in the Albanian capital of Tirana. The most obvious aspect of this initiative today is the instagramable multicolored facades based on modernist principles that discrepantly adorn the brutalist living blocks, or the transition period buildings. Harald Szeemann was so fascinated by what was happening in Tirana that it inspired him to curate the show “Blood and Honey” at the Essl Museum. This state of affairs similar to a total urban artistic heterotopia, culminated in 2003 when the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and Sala, who were invited to participate in Tirana’s Biennale with full support of the local administration, implemented the initial project involving other internationally renowned artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Gillick, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Under these external circumstances Genti Korini's career started to take shape, obtaining a MFA in painting and graphic design from the University of Arts in Tirana in the year 2002. Continued by a masterclass with the renowned German artist Thomas Scheibitz, from which he will develop a particular typology of its subject to be simultaneously at the boundary between an abstract and a figurative stance. With an artistic practice, that its rooted on such diverse mediums like painting, photography, sculpture and object, video art or ceramics, clarifying the context and the architectural ideology and practices underlying the construction of Tirana, are essential in defining the conceptual premises that stand at the basis of Korini's entire corpus of works, and also for the showcased series - Lateral Geometries.

Made in the last 2 years, the paintings represent the central medium at the core of the series, are based on a deliberately analytical practice that starts with the manipulation of disparate architectural elements typical either the communist period, or the transition one. From there, he makes a digital rendering where this elements are rearranged visibly similar with the organizational principles and shape of a still life from depicting the geometric solids – which was the basic practice in the socialist education art system, still existing strongly today – composition which is then copied into the "formal" technique of oil painting on canvas. This process of rearrangement, starting from a clearly ideological view on the monumental architecture, which often tends, in the service of political power, to suppress the individual through its megalithic structure – as falling on its head or blocking ones horizon – makes me emphasize that the structure from Genti Korini's constructions lay on the same principles on which Jacques Le Goff stated that “[a] monument is primarily a disguise, a deceptive appearance, a montage. First of all, it must be dismantled, demolishing the montage, deconstructing the construction and analyzing the conditions in which those documents-monuments were produced”

With this in mind I like to point at Korini's works from the perspective that Walter Benjamin placed the spatial coordinates for the Angelus Novus, looking at the past with his head turned, and with the body taken into the relentless inertia of an ever increasing, entropic, and confusing future. In fact, like in the case of many of the former countries of Eastern Europe, Albania is still seen as being under construction and in an ongoing process towards something unattainable. There, like in Romania, where in the last hundred years three main political models have existed in succession – fascism, the state socialism and contemporary neoliberal practices - with their analogies and developments in relation with arts, have produced subjectivities and generated meanings in public space. For authoritarian regimes, the shaping of urban space was a fundamental part of the political project, and in many cases, the new democratic identity couldn't infuse into these spaces the new born type of society and its values. Wide boulevards with vast urban voids, impressive when seen from above but in utter disconnection to the human scale, defined by long, tiring and vigilant, walking distances are the common criteria for the typology of public spaces in socialist urban environments. In short, if in the West architectural modernism was utilitarian, the "lateral" one of South America or from the East was symbolic and subscribed to the political power. As those places had mainly an aesthetic and symbolic function, there was no preoccupation with creating opportunities for social engagement. It is from these symbolism, voided of its power structure meaning, that Korini creates its new abstract assemblages, proposing to expose them naked to the eye aș being in fact just basic decorative elements.

This concept as starting point in case of the paintings is consistent in the video practice counterpart, and the accompanying drawing artifacts, that could be subscribed to the category of institutional critique - The Drawing Lesson (2019) – a work that depicts the drawing training session at a high school class, demanding the composition of two drawings, one a still life depicting the arrangements of the geometric solids, the second a drawing after a classical element of ornamentation that adorns public buildings. Played backwards, from its final form to the blank page, like a de-Kooning-erased-by-Rauschenberg made in a video technique, it shows the same subconscious process of emptying the meanings that these elements, still ubiquitous to the current methodology and the urban landscape, suffer relentlessly in the new order. Depicted in an abstract constructivist style, these new compositions are placed in a space like a vacuum in the sense of a closed system, where the principles of general relativity are no longer applicable, suppressing especially the gravitational force. This fragile balance strengthens the idea of the simulacrum, or the ersatz-of the object, which they refract today. And, what a better space for analysis than the vacuum. In this context it should also be mentioned that from a historical point of view geometric abstractionism was one of the first choose means of expression in the post-war art, both in South America and in the East of Europe.

Usually the lightning is opaque, illuminating the compositions evenly and ubiquitously from the back, like a backlight. If in the past Korini made use of gradients, now the structures are most often rendered in blocks of saturated neon colors, but more acidic-radioactive at the edges, suggesting the metal skeletons that appear continuously as the surfaces vanishes, increasingly corrosive stances coming out from the former power structures. The effect is a metallic one, alluding to an omnipresent background of technological radio waves. Maybe from a conceptual point of view we could name Korini's painting practice in the general context of his works, as colorizing the deindustrialization. We are basically talking about a similar mechanism that operates in contemporary painting eroding the academic tradition: the attempted denial of the artist’s hand, the tension between reflection and repellency, and the important presence of specific external references based on a technical process. 
- Horatiu Lipot, Bucharest, Romania 2022



 Lateral Geometries / IOMO Contemporary, Bucharest, Romania 2022