“The Curse of the Eye”

Maria Rus Bojan
Amsterdam, 25 March 2023 

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”. 1.

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 have 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.


1. Giorgio Agamben, Toward an ontology of style, Issue # 73 E-flux Journal,
“In Western thought, the problem of form-of-life has emerged as an ethical problem (ethos, the mode of life of an individual or group) or as an aesthetic problem (the style by which the author leaves his mark on the work). Only if we restore it to the ontological dimension will the problem of style and mode of life be able to find its just formulation. And this can happen only in the form of something like an “ontology of style” or a doctrine that is in a position to respond to the question: “What does it mean that multiple modes modify or express the one substance?”





Genti Korini / Lateral Geometries

Horatiu Lipot, Bucharest, 2022

      “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. 

Genti Korini 'Frenetic Standstill'
-Domenico de Chirico / 2020

The work of artist Genti Korini (b. 1979) works as a linkage between painting, sculpture, photography, and video. The essential element of this metamorphosis consists of a translation in a visually modernist interpretation, approached solely stylistically, by postmodern ideologies and narratives, their materialization in correlated architectural forms. Korini’s theory, developed over the years in relation to architecture, deemed by him, an object of study and a great source of inspiration, has roots in the history of his country of origin, Albania, and takes shape as a kind of symptomatology for his ideology’s rapid evolution. His work is strongly influenced by the concept of Frenetic Standstill, according to Harmut Rosa. Korini lives and works in a country that “is changing too quickly for humans to keep up” as Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s futurist book from the 1970s, Future Shock, is stating. Korini finds himself suspended in a world of transition, affected by institutional inertia. The language of modernist abstraction becomes the center of his artistic practice and is often used to comment on ideological contexts, sourced from all the forms that Korini constantly explores and manipulates. Consequently, the viewer’s gaze is forced to explore the migration and reconfiguration of decontextualized forms, as symptoms of social transformations and certain ideologies, although in different ways. The struggle to claim autonomy for the articulation of one’s own space is perhaps the most significant trait of his recent works, situated at half-distance between formalism and social commentary, without belonging to a predefined artistic category. In pictorial terms, the forms that the artist now creates and recreates, using traditional techniques like oil on canvas, are a translation of geometric compositions generated by a computer. Their arbitrary nature comments on the to-and-from, between the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital of post-communist societies, in which the definition of the projection between the surrounding environment and the virtual one becomes confused, even though the real and the virtual are closely connected to one another as is the clash political inertia and social acceleration defining our time.
His painting almost smells of crayon and the remnants of elaborate construction, which in turn reveal a spiral including whispers of past ideologies and evolving languages.

›Speculations/Simulations‹ Frankfurt 20/11/2020—12/02/2021
 — Kristina von Bülow, Frankfurt 2020

Genti Konini’s painted sculptural objects of spatial forms and lines are entirely abstract and yet they reveal their architectural origins. Geometric surfaces, constructional elements, and three-dimensional vectors are joined in vertical constellations in such a way that they result incoherent objects. However, these formations arbitrarily defy the possible in terms of structure and statics and hover freely in the space. At first glance, they appear to be unstable, as if they might collapse at any moment. But then the inner tension becomes discernible by whose centered balance they are held up quite naturally. The constituent components of the objects are mostly geometric shapes such as rectangles, rhombs, and ellipses that are translated to three-dimensionality and then tilted, laid, hung on, or pushed into one another. Basic solid figures like cylinders and pyramids validate this new spatiality of the, in fact, two-dimensional geometries. Even lines attain a third dimension, thereby turning into rods or scaffolds. Shadowing, gradients, and horizons open spaces into the image depth that, in their reduced coloration, insinuate virtual, computer-generated scenographies, evoke cyberspace, and appear like projections or backlighting. The seemingly technical and artificial hue of the space enhances the clear colors of the objects in the foreground. Some additionally seem to be illuminated by invisible light sources beyond the image margins, which becomes apparent in the crisp contours of the shadows and the corresponding light spots. The coloration and the materiality of the object elements have something technical about them as well. Semitransparent and impermeable, neon-colored and metallic, polychrome shimmering, and unicolored surfaces reflect the light and direct the gaze, continuously keeping it moving along the constructed lines. The conceptual starting point for Genti Korini is the eclectic post-communist architecture of his hometown Tirana. The seemingly infinite stylistic possibilities of the new creative freedom are being fathomed there with much individualistic motivation, more often than not with rather offbeat results. This architecture explores and stretches the boundaries of the thinkable. The unique visual character of his environment as a visible sign of the systemic and cultural transformation is the source of a diverse vocabulary of colors and shapes. It is an abundant pool of components and materials that the artist abstracts digitally on the computer and makes use of in his pictorial assemblies. Based on the objective calculations of the computer, he creates the middle-format to large-format oil paintings in which the digital sketches are developed further in his subjective handwriting. The painted objects are technically calculated and could thus in theory be spatially realizable, but in real space would evade manifestation because of physical conditions such as gravity, mass, and weight. Along those lines, the title of the exhibition, ›Speculations / Simulations‹ is an indicator of the purely theoretical physicality of the objects and of the space in which they are situated: They speculate about the space, they simulate architecture. Speculation, as well as simulation, are theoretical, pre practical processes that are still open in their results but work within a given framework and with existing elements. Genti Korini's artistic concept is based on the three consecutive layers of architecture, computer, and painting, which he fluidly interconnects, thereby playfully investigating the boundless possibilities of postmodernism and the present. In his abstract constructions, he fragments a multifaceted cityscape into many pieces, digitally reassembles them, and lastly reconstructs them in painted form. These surreal architectural objects are simultaneously a commentary and homage. 

The Drawing Lesson
— Cristian Nae, Bucharest 2019

A point punctures the void, then wraps the space around it. It expands it vectorially, generating a tension between its yet borderless dimensions and the propensity to stabilize its potential movement. A second point already evokes the possibility of a line which connects them. A second line generates the potentiality of constructing a plane; the latter offers us width, height and dimensions.

Ever since Renaissance, drawing was regarded in European art theory as the condition of possibility of all representation, the underlying method that supports any construction of space. It was also associated to the primary way visual imagination could be structured, offering a tentative materialization of artistic ideas as projected worlds – yet to be born, lingering in a nascent state. The language of Modern art further explored its radicalism, for instance, in the form of the grid, or in the Constructivist and Suprematist reinvention of the spatio-temporal continuum, which highlighted both movement in space and movement as the creation of space – in other words, the very act of spacing. It was recalled, time and again, whenever the question of the representation was questioned or undermined. But what is the purpose of revisiting drawing now?

Genti Korini’s work approaches drawing as the primary language of visual imagination – the sensible plane which allows for the materialization of ideas into forms. It also incorporates it as the link between painting and other spatial materializations of art, such as sculptural forms or photographic images. The language of modernist abstraction seems to be at the core of his artistic practice, which is often used in order to comment on the ideological contexts from which the forms he explores and manipulates are extracted. Devoid of their immediate context, the viewer’s gaze is forced to explore the migration and reconfiguration of forms as symptoms of social and ideological transformations. The struggle to claim autonomy and to articulate a space of their own is perhaps the most important feature of his most recent artworks, which are thus placed half way between formalism and social commentary, not belonging properly to such predetermined artistic categories. They articulate a paradox: abstracted from their immediate reality, these solitary formal arrangements offer us the possibility to perceive reality better, by laying bare the forces that concur to shape them.

Concretely, the architecture of Albania’s capital Tirana as a symptom of the country’s post-socialist turmoil and its neo -capitalist transformations inspires Korini’s work. For the exhibition installed at Jecza Gallery, vernacular motives that may be found in cemeteries as well as in other urban spaces – moulded iron gates and fences, funeral stones and coffee tables – are transformed into a new artistic reality. The choice of the graveyard as a social reference is perhaps not coincidental – after all, it was related by Michel Foucault to heterotopias, atypical places situated within our social space where its normal order is temporarily suspended. It is also the space where private traumas have to be confronted through mourning – only this time, we are confronted with unnoticed social traumas which have to be dealt with on a collective level.

In the photographic series Notes from the Upperground, headstones from Tirana’s graveyards, seen from their back side, are reduced to their shape alone. Their peculiar designs seemingly erase the signs of religious and communist pasts of Albania, becoming new symbols of the current era of rampant individualism. Indeed, design is the key notion which might describe the current age of capitalism – one in which images devoid of symbols take over all spheres of social life, transforming aesthetics into politics. The sculptural series Railings expands the abstractization process initiated in Notes from the Upperground : the curvy forms on top of these grid-like structures echo the aesthetics of the headstones. It is, nevertheless, the migration of form which, once again, gains our attention. It mirrors the circulation of gratings, barriers, fences or gates in today’s Tirana as dividers of space and markers of private property, signalling the process of social fragmentation which makes possible such a migration in the first place. It is less a sign of social cohesion than a mimetic response to the loss of this social bound. Coffee Tables are sculptural elements produced with the same material and technology used to fabricate the headstones. This time, the latter re-emerge as surfaces which re-link the public and the private, facilitating the collective gathering of people in the act of mourning.

The video work The Drawing Lesson attempts to summarize the contradictions of contemporary Albanian society, trapped between East and West, Modernism and Classicist tradition, Socialism and Capitalism. Art students are learning to draw after two different models, a geometric composition of volumes and a flower plaster. The artwork reverses the usual process of learning in an allegorical attempt to unlearn these two lessons and find a new model, a new beginning.

It is perhaps in this poetic invitation to actively forget the contradictions of the past that shaped our present and to start anew – devoid of the illusions of modernism and attentive to the shortcomings and fractures of our current age – that Genti Korini’s works may be situated, afterall. They propose us to excavate our recent and more distant past, to unravel our entangled versions of modernism, and to imagine different historic scenarios, to invent a different approach to our immediate reality, one that bypasses such inherited divisions and conceptual categories. That is why, in the end, his art is not only an acute social diagnosis, but it is also essentially therapeutical. Inspired by the social conditions that allow these forms to circulate in a particular society as images temporarily decoupled from their material embodiments, it also suggests that these conditions are transitory, and that those forms may articulate new social arrangements which are yet to be invented.

'Notes from the Upperground'

— Genti Korini, Tirana 2019

Notes from the Upperground explores the ways in which forms are created, their ideological foundations, and the sociocultural contexts that shape them. I observe and take notes on the physical, aesthetic manifestations of modernist language and their vernacular interpretations in our urban environment. Previously interpreted through painting, here I have expanded my vocabulary, research, and materiality in three new series: Notes from the Upperground, Railings, and Coffee Tables.

In Notes from the Upperground, headstones from Tirana’s graveyards are seen from their back side. Portrait-like, the photographs focus on the stones’ silhouettes and their formal aesthetic information. The photographs deliberately obscure all of the graves’ personal details, reducing the headstones to their shape alone.
In most societies, graveyards are filled with religious symbolism, but here the forms have been replaced with new peculiar designs, ones that seemingly erase the signs of religious and communist pasts of Albania. Instead, I would argue that they represent the hybrid identity of contemporary Albanian society: the bygone collectivist, communist system has morphed today into our consumerist, individualist reality, constructing new imagery along the way.

Two sculptural series, were born out of the photographic work. I designed them with a set of curvy elaborations borrowed from the headstones’ aesthetics. The works ask that the viewer interpret signs and form when separated from the object’s designated function and context.

Railings considers everyday metal gratings or gates, so ubiquitous in Tirana today that they are commonly installed even in graveyards. They function as barriers, dividers, and markers of private property.

The Coffee Tables was produced with the same material and technology used to fabricate the headstones. The publicness of the gravestones is confronted with that of the private — the domesticity of coffee tables. But these spaces are nonetheless linked: the coffee table is a key site of gathering and mourning; it is where we collectively grieve the dead in historical and contemporary Albanian funeral rituals.

ON IDEOLOGY MORPHING INTO FORM

— Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt, Anton Streletzki, Vienna 2014

Albanian artist Genti Korini (b.1979) sets himself an ambitious and nearly impossible goal: he reinterprets painting in its most reflexive and lofty version, that of modernist abstraction.
Abstract painting is rooted in the urge to conquer or overcome as fundamental illusions art in general and painting in particular. This idea is a product of modernity and comes laden with the energy and drive for modernization typical of that age.
The totality of the illusionary essence of painting has been constructed and maintained throughout the history of art. It has permeated the pores and lacunas of artistic practice and of our perception of art. Art’s mimetic nature draws on the traditions of classical antiquity, which are at the roots of Western civilization. After the dark ages of symbolic representation that conceived of reality as a text, rather than an image, mimesis made a triumphant return in the linear perspective (re)discovered by Renaissance artists. It was not until the mid 19th century, however, that painting started to challenge its own tenets, the very same tenets that it had previously exalted and which it had traditionally prided itself in. Therein lie the origins of modernism that by early 20th century had converted this auto-reflexivity and self-questioning into geometric abstraction.

Genti Korini takes into account the conceptual contexts of his predecessors and conceptualizes his artistic practice in its ideological dimension. The latter clearly takes front stage in what he does, which allows Korini to bring together several vexed problems and problem areas in his art.
Genti Korini has a lot to say about architecture. Since the Renaissance it has been the most powerful medium for representation for the powers that be and as such has long served as a material embodiment of dominant ideologies. The architecture of Albanian capital, Tirana, is the major visual inspiration behind Korini’s work, in which the new Albanian architecture emerges as a kind of symptomatology for the rapidly evolving ideology.
Decorative aspects of buildings, urban spaces and the new architecture itself are now conceived of as a visual facet of the larger language of expression, which is intrinsically connected to the imaginary dimension of power (its dream-space or virtual space).
According to Jean Baudrillard, power rests upon control of the space of simulacra, while politics is not “any real action or space, but a certain simulation model that manifests itself through little more than its realized effect”, both perspective constructions of Renaissance artists and drab facades of Tirana’s apartment blocks blasted with color and geometric abstractions are ideological expressions of the dominant visuality. They both are products of the imaginary dimension of the powers that be that exist and operate within their very own historical and social horizons.

Genti Korini is particularly interested in the metamorphoses of the visual idiom “spoken” by ideologies and by the architectural materializations of these metamorphoses, since he believes that architecture is the most expressive and obvious tool that a government has at its disposal.
Under the communist totalitarian regime architecture imposed a certain code of unification, a code for the “(wo)man of the masses”, while simultaneously asserted and celebrated the regime’s triumphant grandeur. In the age of neoliberal freedom the ideological idiom has been hijacked by capital and has found new forms of expressions in the domain of architecture. Therefore, Korini is prompted to ask: how does ideology manifests itself through form? This question reverberates through his paintings and his research projects in photography; for a whole set of reasons it has come to carry particular significance for Albania. Korini talks about the exoticizing, “othering” lens through which the West regards Albania and its art. He believes in the importance of establishing a dialogue with the modernist tradition that has been forcefully and artificially interrupted in his country. How, on what terms is this dialogue possible today? The artist never ceases to reflect on this question, suggesting his own answers to it, as if trying to compensate for the historical lacuna and to fill in this gaping absence with the different versions of modernist abstraction. He continues to develop its ontological reflection and to examine its potentialities in the new and different political and cultural contexts.
Korini is not the only artist to contemplate the relationship between form and ideology within Albania’s urban spaces. A fellow Albanian Anri Sala creates impressive video artworks about the new architecture of Tirana with its houses transformed by means of colors, marked by the imprint of post-painterly abstraction, the most momentous and precious (to today’s capitalism) pinnacle of modernism.

Korini goes to great lengths studying and reconstructing the modernist agenda of image and medium. His abstractions appear to be figurative while remaining abstract. They bear an uncanny resemblance to architecture, while being painterly in essence. They hint at the presence of material objects while simultaneously destroying the construction of space that can potentially contain an object within it. His painterly forms, surfaces and structures mobilize and challenge the viewers’ imagination, but do not provide them with ready-made answers.

GENTI KORINI / THE HYBRID

— Jane Neal, London, April 2014


From the arrival of the seminal essay: "The Death of the Author" in 1967 by the French literary critic and theorist, Roland Barthes, it has been considered outmoded to follow the traditional practice of criticism when considering an author or artist's work: that is, to look for the intentions and biographical context of the originator in order to better understand their practice. Barthes argues that writing (or art), and the creator are unrelated, and that to look for the artist's background in his oeuvre, is to limit his work. That is all well and good, but what if the artist's surroundings and intentions concerning his personal environs form the basis for his actual practice? What, one wonders, would Barthes have made of that?

If it were possible to borrow H.G. Wells' time machine and bring Barthes to Tirana, the capital city of Albania and home to the young painter, Genti Korini, it is possible Barthes would have made an exception to his argument. Since 2007, Korini has been drawing inspiration from the post communist architecture that has quickly sprung up to populate his city. Unlike conventional architecture (which considers the suitability of design in relation to function, permanence and the relationship between the impact of a new building on the existing surroundings and community), the majority of the new buildings that have been erected in Albania are an eclectic mix of shapes and styles that have fused into each other. Though the individual designers behind each building might strive for uniqueness, because they borrow and blend elements from various styles, the result is what Korini calls: a 'state of hybridity'.

Albania's experience of communism was not an easy one. With a heavy dose of irony, Korini explains: 'Here we had the "real deal". The others were flirting with it. Think North Korea and good old-fashioned Stalinism'. It is unsurprising then that post communism brought with it an aggressive refusal of the former uniformity. It is possible to see the architecture that followed as a direct, physical manifestation of the mindset of the people: they yearned to 'do their own thing'. Korini believes that if you're not an insider you might not recognise this, but for him (a painter who lives and works in the city), it is apparent that everyone is trying to break the uniformity of the past because they feel so strongly about it.

Albania is embracing the new ideology of consumerist, capitalist individualism, but in response the buildings that have sprung up, do not so much suggest a bold vision for the future, instead they resemble a state of ephemera, closer to stage design than architecture. There is a dream-like, computer game sensibility to many of the buildings (which is unsurprising considering that the majority are created through the use of architectural software programmes). There are petrol stations that appear more like museums of contemporary art, and restaurants that look like castles: a multitude of incongruous forms resulting in a plethora of unlikely buildings.

While this might be problematic from a purist, architectural perspective, it has proved very interesting and inspiring for Korini. Witnessing the democratization of architecture thanks to the computer software that allows youngsters who (though they might not be trained as architects, are better equipped with the skills necessary to use the architectural software than their older, less 'Tech friendly' counterparts), Korini started to think that it would be interesting to take the phenomenon as a starting point for his own painting practice. He wondered what would happen if he used the same software and manipulated the computer-generated forms in an abstract way. Since the Surrealists exploited automatic writing and painting in their practice, there has been a tradition within abstraction of allowing a work to evolve (we might use the word 'organically', today), as opposed to creating a strict, narrative structure that operates according to the laws of perspective with fore, mid and backgrounds. The difference with Korini's work is that the software supplies the 'surprise' elements, and as a consequence, the paintings (in terms of the origin of their process at least), are situated firmly in the 21st Century.

Though 21st Century technology might be involved in the genesis of Korini's practice, the resulting works are extremely painterly. Korini trained in Cluj, Romania from 1999 - 2001. The school has become known internationally for its figurative painters, artists such as: Victor Man, Adrian Ghenie, Serban Savu (and two of Korini's classmates), Marius Bercea and Mircea Suciu. Korini credits his time there as strongly affecting his painting style and technique. While he himself was a student in Cluj, Korini made figurative paintings. He sees himself as belonging to 'this strong tradition'. He is fascinated with the social and cultural implications of the buildings that now surround him - they are his inspiration - but he loves: 'the process of painting.'

Korini believes that a painting has to work on two levels: the conceptual and the sensual. He feels that there needs to be an intuitive and open process involved, not only in terms of choosing the subject matter, but in the decision making inherent to the painting process: the colours, brushwork, consistency of the paint, and so on. Without this process, it is possible for a painting to work conceptually, but not to function in itself as a technically-balanced painting. Korini is clearly passionate about this issue: 'If I was working with other media then maybe this wouldn't be so important. You need the skill, you have to find a way yourself. Painting today, it seems, has a 'double assignment', it has to have an alibi. Painters can't simply paint, they have to have this reason for painting, an excuse. But we have to let go of this alibi. Painting should not need an excuse. If there is the subject and the desire to work, that should be enough.'

For a while after leaving art school and moving back to Tirana, Korini was taking photographs. The contemporary international scene demanded a new form of socially engaged art, but the situation for Korini in Tirana was demoralising, even impossible. 'You cannot be a conceptual artist here because no one will fund your project. You cannot be a photographer either because no one would sponsor you.' Increasingly, Korini realised that he wasn't interested in conforming to a prescribed 'type'. He decided to come back to the medium of painting to execute his ideas and to abandon 'the artificial components' of his painting practice (the acrylics and sprays), concentrating instead on using the traditional medium of oil to depict his very contemporary subject matter. Korini also made a deliberate decision to situate his abstract forms within a classical portrait format. As with a traditional portrait that might depict a king or queen in the centre of a canvas, three quarters turned, so Korini has set up his subjects, thus creating his own homage to the ruling state of hybridity in Albania's post communist landscape.

There is a power inherent in Korini's paintings. They address Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum, the desire to live in a state removed from reality, but they also serve as monuments to the collision of two major occurrences that changed the course of history. The early 1990's saw the countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc adjusting to life after communism while simultaneously, the world started to experience the greatest technological expansion of all time: the advent of the global internet. A new freedom enabled the construction of this new state of hybridity, which Korini's paintings brilliantly encapsulate. Much as Morandi's still lifes of the early 20th Century often seem to function more as portraits than depictions of objects, so Korini's abstracted shapes speak of a people struggling to find expression for their new found autonomy and consumerist desires.

Korini is not yet decided on how he feels about the architecture that has become his muse. On the one hand he enjoys the exotic nature of the buildings and the identification in people's minds of Tirana with an architecture that would not be out of place in Las Vegas. On the other, he does not think this is the way the city should be. Whatever his feelings, Korini's painting raises an awareness - not only of the architectural situation, but of the place of abstraction. Abstract art is problematic for Albanians. Thanks to the influence of Constructivism, there was a short-lived movement of abstraction in Albania, but this was soon rejected and censored by the state and, under communism, only socialist realism was permitted and supported. Consequently, even today, Korini believes that Albanians have a problem understanding abstract art because they had so little contact with abstract language. Ironically and paradoxically, if someone in Tirana was to look at Korini's painting and then look outside their window, we might imagine they would make a connection and realise they were in fact living amongst this abstract scenery. Yet somehow, Korini feels, they can neither see it, nor feel it; it is an unconscious response.

Formally, this series of works by Korini is strongly influenced by Constructivism, most notably: El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich and Antoine Pevsner. Yet the influence extends beyond the works from the movement; Korini is also inspired by the utopian vision that lay behind the establishment of this new language. He returns to Constructivism in order to connect with this period of Modernism, in effect drawing a metaphorical line from the movement to now, 'like an architect'.

Korini enjoys the mixture of hard geometry with a painterly non-perfect surface in his work. It is possible to look beyond the Constructivists as instrumental in the development of his practice. Picasso is a great source of inspiration - not only in terms of subject matter but in terms of his handling and mixing of paint. "Portrait of Jacqueline" 1961 has proved a particular reference for Korini, also the works of the Hungarian artist, Laszlo Moholy Nagy.

Though Korini's works are powerful there is a tenderness woven into the treatment of his forms. It might seem a diametrically opposed impossibility that a monumental structure can also be fragile, but somehow Korini manages to evoke this. Some of the paintings resemble torn paper, others seem more plastic, as if Korini has first modelled his subject in clay and then depicted it, as a painter would address a still life. As afore mentioned, it is impossible not to think of some of Morandi's arrangements of still lifes when looking at Korini's paintings, but though some of his paintings' palettes also consist of closely related tones, others are much more lively and vibrant, revealing a debt not only to Constructivism, but also to Fauvism. Cubism is clearly also a reference for Korini, indeed the early years of 20th Century painting and sculpture seem to hold a strong fascination for the artist.

The state of hybridity that Korini finds himself living in, plays out in the extremely effective combination of technologically derived subject matter, executed in a painterly manner and combined with the influences of the vivid modernist movements of the early 20th Century. From the way he treats his subject matter, Korini clearly has a certain fondness for the buildings that have become a source of fascination for him. However, we should not lock the artist into acts of social and cultural observation. His figurative training and understanding of the human body has also inspired him and we cannot help but anthropomorphise his subjects.

Korini epitomises that rare combination. Though all his work is undergirded by a rigorous intellect, conceptual drive and pertinent engagement with the world around him, he is more than simply curious or committed to recording events. Korini is first and foremost a painter. He is driven by the seductive nature of his chosen medium and its plastic potential and buttery facility to breathe warmth and life into the artists's subject of choice. He does not simply use paint to evoke the state of hybridity that so fascinates him, he creates a convincingly consistent world where we can feel the full phenomenological force of this state of being, and the human desires that have driven it. Like so many before him, Korini needs no alibi to paint, he just needed to find confidence and inspiration in the world around him; and from the strength of this new body of work, he clearly has.