SOLO EXHIBITION IN PARIS
Impressions from French admirers:
Authentic exhibition -original...
Celebration...
Magnificent creator. .. Perfect originality...
Weil done -bravo for creator -Nobel. ..
The exhibition is psychological with a dramatically content. ..
A new conception of painting in art...
This exhibition is brilliant. ..
Fantastic composition, a rare talent...
Two painters are deeply touched with the real art.. .
High class and pure art...
I am surprised and satisfied that I’ve discovered this painter. ..
The exhibition is very strong and rich. He’s a rare talent...
Marvelous Heaven. ..
A painter archeologist or an archeologist of other world. ..
A dark autobiography; but marvelous and dynamic...
The ideas are genius...
Very brave...
We'd to know better this rich world with the real values. ..
I’ve come here for the first lime, I'm impressed... WELL DONE...
After all, the braveness...
Weil done, bravo...
A JOINT EXHIBITION AT THE ROCKEFELLER PALACE GALLERY lN NEW YORK
This exhibition was highly estimated according to the critics of contemporary art. As for them, at this exhibition Xhevdet Xhafa's work is outstanding.
THE EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY ART lN WELLINGTON, SYDNEY
More than 100 paintings, sculptures, artistic photos exhibited at this exhibition were highly acclaimed.
A French critic Oskland Strary stresses: "the Yugoslav art doesn't represent any world power in artistic aspect." Though, there are some artists, whose importance goes beyond its borders.
He distinguishes the work of Šutel, Xhafa, Rotar and Abramović.
THE EXHIBITION AT THE MODERN GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS lN ROME
At this exhibition 60 artists have participated.
The critics have praised the work of 11 creators among them were Xhafa's, too.
THE ALTERNATIVE OF OUR CONTEMPORARY ART lN VIENNA
These artists are mainly known for our public with their inventive selections, with theirs sincerity, and with their modesty for technical realization bring to foreign public those that are known in its detailed variant: Xhevdet Xhafa and J. Bujić are the real representatives of our individuality in the stream of contemporary art.
Xhevdet Xhafa with his combined technique without any doubt demonstrates a culture of expression in the frame of associative abstraction.
K. Vasilković
Xhevdet Xhafa in spite of abstract-lyrical tableaus composes with wide black color tracks in white background and offers us expressive associations of mighty robustness.
Xhevdet Xhafa enters resolutely in the field of associative abstraction, which is close to mentality with the determination of common expressionist.
Đ. Kadijević
Xhevdet Xhafa in his graphics realizes a refined detail.
P. Vasić
THE WORK WITH ARTISTIC PERFECTION
Xhevdet Xhafa is a painter whose artistic values of figurative creation have exceeded national frameworks and thug he is ranked among the distinguished names of creators in European figurative art.
The artist with presentations in national and international exhibitions was in the center of attention and evaluation of critic figurative art. In these presentations, except that he was estimated and distinguished as a real artist, at the same lime he achieved to sensitize and affirm the modern Albanian art.
He was barn in Peja in 1935 he gains there the first lessons (about art. He has studied the painting at the Academy of Figurative Arts in Ljubljana, at the class of Professor Gabriel Stupica.
His enormous pictorial creation totally belongs to the cycle "Autobiography" and "PlusAutobiography".
The paintings realized between 1967-1979 of the cycle "Autobiography", belongs to his first phase.
Since 1979 up to now, the paintings that are part of the cycle "Plus Autobiography", are systemized as creative works of a great capital value. The works of two cycles present a creation and a complete view of his artistic creation, where the author uses different original material.
The elements used from ethno-tradition enabled him to create an individual art, autochthonous, a symbolic art thug never changing and never being moved from national bedrock.
This "Autobiography" created evolutionally is a daily reality, which still exists and expresses the individual artistic abilities.
Besides the emphasized elements as figurative means the author uses even symbols that have a character of a message with a refined, progressive, freedom-loving and universal message.
The paintings express the different moments of crises e.g. author's psychic and dramatic traumas, respectively of the environment, the circle where the'8rtist lives and works.
The realizations, in other words, present and are the result of thinking, anxieties and impatience for getting as soon as it is possible the truth.
In these paintings the compositional elements are realized skillfully and artistically. They are connected harmonically, there's nothing that happened by chance but everything was submitted to the artistic composition.
In the works of these two phases if$ obvious permanent continuity, the artist constantly is demanding, researching successfully and achieves perfection in artistic creation. The compositional elements have no real forms, but there the colors and forms are important where really well are contrasted the stresses of different valerians.
Through these elements, clear surfaces, relief, plastic, colors, tools of symbols laid and a force and ability which as a volcanic fervor bursts from intellect and the author's spirit. In these works it can be noticed a power and individual ability, sincerity, expression and perfection, they are complete and studious, it obvious maturity of creation of this author where through individuality is presented collectivity respectively through personal is documented the national.
In every creation the author is facing with new problems and achieves undeniable results. Xhevdet Xhafa is a talented painter, a great artist, a creator of modern orientated expressionist, and about his work it should be spoken, commented and written.
As an individualist painter he has found the pure figurative language and independent way of developing his artistic art.
Prof. dr. sc. Fejaz Drançolli
SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In the map completely scattered of artistic events, what's more attracting is especially unexpectedness of many phenomenon, possibility of proposals and selections completely sudden, the jack of privileges, which would belong to languages, environments, certain generations, the stress of attention, on the contrary, passes to the talent and the artist's- individual's value in the world of notions (meanings) that the work itself expresses.
Here, even for me, one of such unexpectedness and surprises, although at the same time claming a talent and value: it is about the work of a painter Xhevdet Xhafa, a painter who works out of the leading artistic environments, completely far away from information that are circulating and have to do with present art. But, having into consideration ail this, he is a painter that with the originality of his work, which he has created during the last years, he should have a distinguished place in contemporary art scene.
Xhafa is a figure of an artist that has always lived: this is a figure of the artist who is very far from clichés ofdominating phenomenon, the isolated artist, completely withdrawn, concentrated only in his anxieties, headed toward his cultural and living environment, totally uninterested for the big world of artistic events. Xhafa's desire is to create a painting, which will rely on tradition of cultural environment. Xhafa's paintings are not special names, in wholeness they create a big strip of artistic works, which he thinks of and entitles them HisArtisticAutobiography.
Jesa Denegri
"IN THE SOURCE OF EVENTS"
Even the best experts of figurative circumstances, do not have a clear view about the Kosova's artistic scene.
Thus, with consideration we have accepted the painter Xhevdet Xhafa in salon of Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade.
A member of the middle generation barn in 1935, he was raised in the classes of best pedagogues at the Academy in Lubjana, and since the beginning he's involved in the source of contemporary events. His opus of twenty paintings of big gallery formats with brutality of views reminds you of Rafael Kanogar's "brutalism", also much more it reminds of the spirit of "new realism" of the Paris group of painters and sculptors (Armon, Cezar, Difren, Hajns, Rajn, Rotela, Spoeri, Tengli, Vilegle), which was inaugurated by Pier Rastan at the historical exhibition "40 degrees above dada", which was supposed to represent European counterbalance, the powerful stream of Anglo-Saxon pop-art.
Zoran Markush
XHEVDET XHAFA '5 PICTORIAL BIOGRAPHY
In his painting, Xhafa successfully presents demands of modernism through artistic individuality. He is synchronized ail this by researching and finding new tools of expression in painting.
Xhafa's pictorial opus enables to understand that there is maximally concentrated an experience of whole life, which belongs to socio-cultural context where he lives in.
In Xhafa's relief and bas-relief is poured the whole living anxiety, nervous pressure and dramatic that touches even the limits of depression, which takes a creative character and authorial of pictorial execution. There are the used means e.g. colors, the common objects artistically are freed from prejudices in order with their primary destination to get transformed in signs that materializes artistic conceptions and existential powerful metaphors.
Through a modern technique, physiognomy and thematic, the author manifests courage that stands in front of the form and meta-forms, a life which as an artistic research results potentially with possibilities, but even realistically big to bring artistic values in forms that are esthetically ri pen and professional.
In his painting, which very original Xhafa make a synchronization between means of expression and artistic conceive, by opening a road to a phenomenology of opened work, which is at the same time art and existential life dominated by many difficulties and an autobiography with elements of a cultural anthropology.
Xhafa's relief is characterized with a dense artistic synthesis, also socio- cultural of means, techniques and thematic that result with a new artistic quality through which living reality becomes artistic reality.
There the surrounding elements enable us to exist, become stable elements of artistic expression linked sensitively, where in deepness of artistic structures and color can be searched the relation between a man and being and existence. Many expression means, from the black color to the rags, which comprise within the main dramatic symbolic, gets artistically and mutually connected by influencing each other.
The wholeness submits parts, while they are naked form daily prejudices multiply their symbolic meaning and become obsessive ideas in function of pictorial wholeness for completing artistic message and gets transformed by artistic inspirations, in pictorial structures of cultural presence of a life and a nation...
In this characteristic of pictorial opened work with a surprising richness of taken and given symbols, beside the perfect structure.
Xhafa creates also the met-form which corresponds with artistic idea and which link all elements of artistic expression, which are not necessarily material elements.
Meta-form there is formed from wholeness of thinking, feelings, psychology and other under-textual elements, which together as a painting to the one that comprehends creates a feeling of perfection, conceitedness, sublime and their interrelationship by a domination of purity, which is very daring and original.
Prof. dr. Kadri METAJ
MORE THAN IT WAS EXPECTED
Xhevdet Xhafa, for such a long lime is the most attractive creating nature, he works with expressive tools, which very well verified and deeply studied.
Thus, it isn't without importance that he has studied in Ljubljana, at the class of Gabriel Stupica.
Xhafa with a force of a great talent and with unrepeatable creating sincerity succeeds to give us an opus with sensitiveness, deep impacts and completely contemporary; the opus in which through the individuality he gays a lot for the common and the personal proves the national.
With no decorations and false frankness, but with engagement and anxiousness, the messages with complicated iconography and symbolic meaning, sometimes they can be difficult to understand.
Xhafa, better than any other our creator expresses the essence of events and life in Kosova.
Nikola Kusovac
DRAMATICAUTOBIOGRAPHY
Xhevdet Xhafa, generally speaking is the pleasantness surprise in figurative art. Before ail for his distinguished authenticity of the culture from where Xhafa comes and his extraordinary ability to change that culture and ils obvious traditional note into a contemporary symbolic: acceptable for everyone.
Xhafa's painting relies on the tradition of Kosova's under cultural sky full of instinctive magical and mystical evocations. With a characteristic sensitiveness, ils breadth of expression reaches to the newest artistic researching Xhevdet Xhafa has achieved that through the exhibited cycle of painting to present, among others, and his spiritual autobiography, by stressing subjective and intimate character, also the tragic and dramatic feeling of the existence and culture which he belongs to.
The cycle "Autobiography" is done in its best tradition, not only for the technical implementation, but also according to the idea and sense in which he moves from classic elements of painting and to its process of painting. His paintings create an extraordinary harmony of the form, colors and symbols, thug they build a world by which every one can find a piece of his past, or to foresee and recognize the present.
The first knowledge about painting he gained in his hometown, while later the Academy and his studies he attended in Ljubljana. Although that the basis of artistic expression he build in a specific environment and other cultural space he never loges the connection with his original ambience, even when he researches under the various influences of versatile possibilities of figurative art. On the contrary, especially Xhafa creates for as long as he lives and the end of it cannot be imagined, because every new painting of this cycle opens new possibilities and irritations (inciting).
Vera LLUKOVAC
INDIVIDUALAND COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY
Xhevdet Xhafa was barn in Peja in 1935, he was lucky enough to be educated and trained at the Academy of Arts in Ljubljana, in the class of well-known painter Gabriel Stupica. So it was expected, that at the first step of creation, Xhafa has faced the world of modern art, concretely with the world of vocations of the sixties with which were marked big changes in practice and esthetics of world's art.
Thus, his entering in Kosovar visual art with modern world outlook and avant-guarde intention is absolutely reasonable. As it is known with the principle called "ready made" of the distinguished dadaist Marcel Duchamp, are characterized and identified ail newness, radical changes in the philosophy and art of 20th century.
This principle entered also in Kosovar art, especially through Xhevdet Xhafa's pre-dogmatic creations. Xhevdet Xhafa always was between "pop art" and "the new realism", but this last one was more suitable for his creative-esthetic sensibility, which means he joined those artists who communicate with a man through his living pre-dogmas, whether they are trivial or even ugly. Through this kind of communication, the artists like: Klein, Tingel, Restan, Cesar, Armani, etc., actualize a new philosophical concept about life, reality or as Pier Restan said, they present the reality in different aspects of; its totality. And exactly this philosophical concept, this creative experience, our painter Xhevdet Xhafa highly regards, in his cycle of paintings "Autobiography", which without any doubts takes a proper place among anthological and museum's wholeness that are the most articulated in all-Albanian paintings.
The author doesn't stand so much the beauty, because with ail his creating self is devoted to the truth. The concept of beauty in his painting is embodied notion within historical, social, cultural and political identity of our being. Especially for this, the cycle we're mentioning, is not just an author's individual autobiography but collective autobiography, it is more, a testimony although that stingy time's traps, confronting repressions and different anathemas, our being did not loge the national identity.
While articulating typical characteristics of mentality, the way of living and other features of our ethnos, according to the compositional structure and concept in pictorial tableaus get resetting relations directly with ail reduces and contradictions that it has.
He uses them in paintings in a way and as much as they are functional to realize the idea, as much it is needed to express it with the language of contemporary art. Although, he entangles in an organic wholeness, in fact, every author's tableau is a world itself, and further more, it is a structure of dense signs, symbols and semantic'- semiology notions. Such a structure, for sure, presents black color with red, this typical national symbol, where we find the confessions about the past but also messages for the future. In fact, through this symbolic sometime over- painted with white color, interwoven with a burnt stone firedog and other elements, the author expresses the truth of community, to which he belongs, while recalling that the his past was not just as, always happy, quiet, and at the end, to make it clear that the anti-hero can be found not only in literature but in paintings, too.
Xhevdet Xhafa has actualized among us the letter "ë", which not only that distinguishes the specific of Albanian language culture, it symbolizes also the pain, a spiritual state which was so much whispered in our historical memory. So, even this silenced vowel, beside other specifics of our nation's totality, treated with the philosophy of the time, proves how much deep, powerful and meaning it is Xhevdet Xhafa's painting.
Mustafa Ferizi
THE DRAMATIC EMOTIONANDVOLCANIC ENERGY
Xhevdet Xhafa belongs to the prudent generation of figurative creators. There's no doubt that he has played and still does the primary role in developing and affirmation of art in Kosova and wider.
Since the 70'ties he is an active participant in personal and collective exhibitions, but those, which had international character should be particularly emphasized.
The essence of figurative thinking in naming the works "The Autobiography" is without any doubt the emphasis of the subjective and intimate meaning. In contrast to earlier works, where the small formats in ail technique were dominating, and where the painter was bringing associations of life, now he begins to lame step-by-step the panel by applying the color.
The newness in these compositions are the materials that belong to his family and the surroundings, by which he was lied intimately and without any doubt these ones are bringing the freshness and the suggestiveness of idea.
On white surface of canvas the author expresses the thoughts, by presenting symbolically a modern and pure language.
In the same way, by the one of figurative tools he expresses his feelings, his state of mind and surroundings, etc.
This painter attains and continually fulfills himself, beginning tram the first days of his childhood until to present age. As for the author it doesn't matter which color he uses the white or black, whether it a rag or paper, he expresses upon them his feelings and his state of mind.
The gesture movements are reflected in relief structure of objects and ' they become a containing part of compositional form with an emphasized on materializing the forms that act powerfully. Sensitivity, power of expression, authenticity and his courage become richer during obvious and realist alternation.
Compositions reach deep psychosocial and fantastic expression. The painter through this form present himself and he gels connected masterly between life and art.
Since Xhafa's attitude almost in ail visual elements collides with the line of structural painting, then we can say that he possesses the observation of a rare kind, which can be identified even at the other painters, who cultivate and have the same concepts, which shows us about the specifics of this author among the other artists who are living and working in Kosova. In Xhafa's painting we can see that he was avoiding by every means the figurative traditional forms.
We can deal with rational stylization of figure, about the idea of objective form, which has in it dramatic contents and in a way it condense and by the other it turns out to be as volcanic energy.
From these contexts comes out the universal and artistic values of this author's work.
Prof. dr.sc. Hivzi Muharremi
EMOTIONAL STRATIFICATION OF AUTOCHTHONOUS SURROUNDINGS
Composed only by the works of new cycle "The Biography", this Xhevdet Xhafa's exhibition could be viewed as a whole, a serious penetration and extremely refined in plastic problematic, which gives to the author, who haven't realized so many until now, a specific and an extraordinary place among the artists who are living and creating in Kosova.
Realized with powerful evocative obedience, Xhafa's plastic entireties are created by two inciting formatting forces: first of ail of the estimated circle, from life and emotional stratification of autochthonous surroundings and from traditional values, which, later, luckily, will be incorporated in spaces of "dark ecstasies."
Then, maybe, it is the learned and absorbed one in a brilliant way, which has enabled Xhafa to enter without any complexes into a dialogue with convents of nowadays' plastic thought.
As a student of distinguished Slovenian artists, Xhafa, excellently of the word, has used the possibility of his initiation in the world of pictorial values.
In his cycle "The Autobiography", Xhafa easily and undoubtedly can be said that has achieved completely a different medium, the combination of surface which is painted finely, respectively the background, with a crafted compositional above ail, in constant weaving with concrete fragments of original material of dresses or even of the torn parts of dresses, things, which now are leftovers, and cannot be used to its first destination, and other words of those "plastic quotations", which, once being incorporated into a specific figurative spaces, in silenced and low monochromatic registers, except ail primary distinctive qualities and visual tactical-natural features, prepare a kind of spiritual dimension, which enables to be incorporated organically in a new context, without any obvious resistance, and which necessarily become an integral part of specific figurative vision.
As for this Xhafa's attempt, as it seems, it's nothing else than, according to the selected way and subtle suitableness, the complete affirmation of essential pictorial acting in an understandable way out of rigorously traditional form.
In this plan ifs completely sure that Xhafa's attempt is out of any tendency for simple innovation.
But, here it is very important the way of indirect traditional idiom, which is transformed with imagination, by which, with retroactive acting, the new function is ensured and through artistic interpretation the other meaning is ensured, too.
Dušan Djokić
IN ETHNIC CONTEXT
Xhevdet Xhafa follows the paradox of painters, which in fact belong to great art. Beside Petar Lubarda, Gabriel Stupica, Orden Petkovski. Dušan Dzamonja and Xhevdet Xhafa is a part of anthological resistance in the scene of former Yugoslav art. Even that nowadays some of the theorists the multicultural phenomenon are accounting as dishevel of hegemonies in figurative art, respectively "filling of empty spaces with new names", I reckon that Xhevdet Xhafa's work without any doubt will have to survive in international scene, not to fill the holes, but it will have its own position of individual values. The well- known Hegel's separation about the world in works and madness maybe can find a real and close media especially in Balkans...
Xhafa is among those authors who create an autochthon symbiosis art, by standing completely in the bedrock of his milieu, and of his Ego. Comparing to other painters Xhafa attains the illusion through inventiveness. The differences, movements and the trends of modern art do not have any influence on Xhafa's work, on the contrary he continued "The Autobiography". From his view regenerates the ethno-tradition, the position of the man in his milieu and consequences of the form with that reality until nowadays by blessing the anticipated abilities and endless outlook of civilization. Xhafa is a classical example of the Steppenwolf, a metaphor of artist's solitude. Penetrating through cracking of times and history, who since the beginning continues to find the imagination at the end of modernization's oblivion. Projection of thought and the source of the ideal are categories, which are over-standing in his lively artistic work. Man's dress, daily and woven material, sounding signs of his existence (ë, v) remains in the level of non-multiplication in evolution for bringing back the presence of the man. The matter is built as the only mass "concrete" from material, dress, leftovers of the house and the streets. The detachment from formatted elements is transparent and impossible. On the surface of paintings the anxieties and solitude are floating. The self-consciousness of presence and necessity of active reaction in certain political situation participates the possible horizon in something else... The presence that is called something the intact (in material or destructive form appear as a particular avoiding from esthetics). They are witness taken from the straight reality in over-oriented function (in the ethnic, geographic and social context), and they act and go through metamorphoses even in this field of art. Beside materials, used matters, the symbols remain the messages headed toward determining the geographic, social and ethnic level. The body of painting is presented in ail its energy and in ail her naked phenomenology, by which it draws the outlook of majority. Since 1987 to the present without any interruption the phenomenon purity stands in his work. The real structure of Xhafa's paintings is in correlation with the truth. Xhafa through motoric gets into his body the artistic material on canvas, the definition is very close to the expression that builds his autochthonous work. The moral of t he author is connected with a category of a high level. The artistic ideology is freedom and progression, the codex of expression presumes the state that is in crisis, the dramatic psychic traumas, in ail these cases he is a typical exponent in himself.
Sonja Adzibajeva
THE PAINTER OF OUR LANDS
Xhevdet Xhafa's incessant exhibitions during eighties and nineties in 20 century marked very important events in national art. This was a result and a crown of his tireless and permanent work in his contributing and enriching our culture by fulfilling a new chapter in history of our national visual art.
Furthermore historical and social conditions also the rich cultural inheritance of the past has left traces in the form and content of this creator's works. His constant dissatisfaction, inner research, absurd paradoxical limes, utopia, ail these are treated and synthesized in visual creation.
Although that he is dissatisfied and prepared to give new answers to these realities. With pure and powerful inspiration, with endless love, never stops using the source of rich and solid iconographies that expresses the existence, optimism and life.
Universal communications rely on reconstruction of events, challenges, by making successful pictorial, iconographic and semantic transformations. In painting Xhevdet Xhafa brings many fragments of our common life. The meaning of every fragment has the power of aliveness, the aura between reality and fantasy, irrationality and sublimation.
From painting to painting, comes in order the particularities of life, the ordinary objects are turned into a canvas, which tends, but they also convince, in new redefining of the reality
In this context, Xhevdet Xhafa doesn't insist that conceiving shou1d be stronger than reality. The content of visual ideas in Xh. Xhafa's painting mold psychological-dramatic eruptions, present sharp sensibility, a series and shocking experiences.
This author and his visual creation are deeply rooted in lime, social courses, identity and existence.
Also this creator has done the best penetrating in essential content, in levels of thoughts structuring with powerful vocations, while abject values rises in new meanings of space and esthetic.
In painting original, traditional and archaic material undergo through metamorphosis by appearing and changing in new shapes of life, which contain combinations of: vision, thought, intellect, esthetic extension and functionality of visual art, by interconnecting history, individual and national memory, the Albanian essence and existence.
Autochthonous intensions correspond with the sign of lime, creator's spirit and experience.
"Inner Hemorrhage" of painting ends in an ancient world then in an Albanian incarnated world with sentimental, cosmologic and earthy symbols.
Xhevdet Xhafa's painting contains material and spiritual essence and relies on principles of clean and pure forms, also of the rich visual structure.
Multilayered language and reinforced by esthetic figurative codes, themes and existential motifs, essential, psychological burdens, the sky of our lands, high and rich creativity, perfect technique, creating self- consciousness, ail these make us to conclude that our visual creation has a worthy representative who can represent us respectfully everywhere in the world.
Xhevdet Xhafa's autobiography is of this land, ambient, Albanian universe; at the same time it is the autobiography of us all.
Prof. dr. Skender Boshnjaku
THE WORKS WITH UNIVERSAL VALUES
Xhevdet Xhafa (1935) belongs to the first generation of Kosova's modern painters. The opinions about his art have been and still remain controversial. In artistic circles and Kosovar critics his painting mainly was underestimated, while, abroad, when it was present was highly acclaimed as the best one.
Although we have to determine that the disdainful of Xhafa's painting doesn't come from the ignorance.
He participated regularly in many collective exhibitions, with the works that provoke strong impressions.
The trouble with Xhafa is that these impressions usually are very anxious.
Even me, myself that I appreciated for years hi works, usually seeing them in small doses. I was surprised with the anxiety that conquered when I saw them ail and as wholeness.
After four hours I spent in Xhafa's studio, I was exhausted from gloominess and density of his painting.
The feeling I had was the one of overdose! The path that Xhafa is following, until very late he was alone, it doesn't suits the dominating spirit and stream in Kosova's artistic scene.
Until the end of the eighties in Kosova they were not appreciated and supported projects of visual arts, which busted out the frames of a modernization of the late type, which goes around the realism and figuration with 'experimenting' shapes, which were consumed in world's art 50 or 100 years ago.
Xhafa in his works uses national bedrock, Albanian motives, by applying parts of traditional clothing.
Even nowadays it can be noticed the national affectation, when in his paintings he puts the letter "ë", just to stress the distinctive character of the Albanian language and his suitability, although without any doubt the moaning and complaining sound of this letter.
Xhafa is different from the generation of Kosovar painters by being contemporary and closer to the current movements of world's art.
In his painting, he has achieved his thematic and stylistic ripeness in the seventies, when the painter was 35 years cid, lays visual expressions of worldview and ideas that had permeated the Western world after World War Two.
The dynamics of development in international artistic scene was quick and complex, though even the bigger and the most supported scenes from countries on Europe's margins (where Kosova was a margin of margins) couldn't pace the step with galloping trends, which were oriented in the newness.
However, the contemporary art is not only a race and a continuous run for discovering newness, but it has stations of sublime projects, insisting in durability.
Otherwise, Xhafa is a painter of unique vision. At him we notice a fanatical devotee in creating a subjective vision of the world. He is a phantasm of mystic type, which resembles to a figurative rite where in cyclic way from a painting to a painting are repeated the essential cannons of a blessing.
Inspired by the pessimist philosophy of the time, Xhafa's painting is focused on existence, presenting the 'biography' on big tableaus, which is understood as a biographical tableau.
He stresses the subjective and unrepeatable dimension of existence by calling his entire opus 'Autobiography'.
The paintings are numbered 'Autobiography' 1, 2 ..., 27..., 32, with formal chances, for they do not mark the biography's chronological course, but first of ail a substantial and vertical order of existence.
Xhafa's painting is not formed only through colors and forms but it is colonized with various things of environment, which are important for his life and the world that surrounds him. The small painting composed on a painting is his the most powerful and creative work. This building universe of the image carries into a painting a part of real importance, above ail as a matter, also as a function and a spirit. It is understood that the applied things are laid in paintings turned into shapes and figurative signs. Artistic proceeding lays in overturning the classic scheme of mimesis and nature, in reflecting the real forms in Xhafa's painting, the nature turns into painting. The nature reflects and 'imitates' a painting, by framing the leftovers of a reality as if their being was from a painting or image. This only happens in a way that resembles hardening of life, like the painter wants to embrace the life's impulses in their critical stations, the ones where of stopping, sufferings, in fact of a serial suffering, which discover that life in its essence is a continuous death. The author precisely collects and marks floating and mortality of the things, thug, every his painting resembles the monuments.
In every way there is something tragic in this undertaking. It can be compared with Buddhist's vision of floating world. While Xhafa creates an impression of a permanent diving in nothingness and emptiness, the days sin king into nights, lives into deaths, an entropy view about the world, a chaotic catalogue of casting and endless melting, rotting and unsteadiness, where the canvas of painting become as a glittering curtain, which according to a Buddhist refines the demarking point between the hopeless, material and cheating world, and the unreal reality conditionally 'the beyond one', which is discovered in contemplative concentration in nothingness and in experiencing the selfness of observer of nirvana rescuer.
According to the concept of painting, Xhafa doesn't abandon the constructive principle in creating the vision. Even in the painting deeply sad, images of visions without path, he is very insisting in the principle of image composing.
The distinction value of the Xhafa's work lay especially in conceptual and figurative succeeding to create an original work with some deep and meaningful aspects. This also marks a distinctive monumental clash. 50, 1 want to say that Xhafa's painting stands beside the best Wols works.
In Xhafa's works we find a lot materials and applied things, which he lays in painting as entropy leftovers entity, by throwing them there without any logical order, as signs of chaos and nothingness.
But, knowing the fact the painter doesn't give up to the permanent flood of entropy, shows that he remains Eros and Pathos a torch-bearer of a creator who believes his own force of a Demiurge, which in his works pours the gift and forming energy and artistically constructive.
Thus, the way Xhafa applies the real objects and their leftovers in paintings he creates swollen stratification effects and bas-relief of a kind, where you can gel impression that they are laden with a hidden energy and ready to explode.
50, even the duskiest paintings of this creator are composed carefully just to reach a paradoxical image of a black cup of plenty, with a baroque content and facture, where many nuances of the black color also the others in limited quantity, are masterfully entwined not only for the effect of reflecting the richness of forms and entropy signs in the background of an extreme pessimism, also to prove the presence of an intensive energy and creative pulsing, which as it is brings the latest news for the rescuer role of art.
Shkëlzen Maliqi, July 2002
TOACHIEVETHEPERMANENTANDTHEUNFORGOTTEN
Many theorists of Balkans contemporary art have concluded that what's tradition of art and constant culture have dominated in the discourse of nations' art that have lived and are living in this region and continent about 5000 years, and to the artists of this territory, which supported the language of figurative art for 20 centuries.
These 70 years in Balkans suburb has been supported the language of modern art, and this language unfortunately ended as a mechanical common construction in divided elements from artistic dictionary, without being reached at the point of their aim's integrity.
The exhibition that is opened at the Contemporary Museum in Skopje, it seems to show that the thesis of essential crossroad and the difference between the folkloric and modern can be formulated in a conclusion that everyone's duty is to present any figurative creator in our space, it can be very hard to realize it, but it's not unrealizable.
We are dealing with more than 30 Xhevdet Xhafa's paintings of big formats, a well-known Kosovar painter.
In the frames of his aim is the only one cycle with the title "Autobiography".
In this solo exhibition powerfully and proudly are acting his displays with a modern spirit, build from the most purest' elements, with traces of Balkans territories.
We have to conclude that Xhevdet Xhafa is one of very rare painters in Balkans space, which in his works has succeeded to gain an artistic formula, equal in functioning with the elements of tradition of artistic language.
There's a question, where is the secret of figurative artist's success, which is that elementary key that ethnographic elements in a forgotten world changes them into intellectual world as examples of civilization and contemporary situations.
In other words, which is the power that surrounds even that which is simultaneously forgotten as double-breasted waistcoat interwoven in Xhafa's wrappings, which will function in the level of artistic language as the same sign e.g. a body of crushed car and Cesar's sculptures.
The answers on these questions, as it seems, are very simple, in other words the quality is the base that empowers Xhafa's rare creation.
It's the awareness of individual accompanying, the artistic thought, a thought that the elements of modern discourse are means of purpose for its own, a pretend of pictorial purpose that speaks with the language of art. In abilities of qualities that are being mentioned constantly were characteristic examples of creator's artistic truths.
At the end one of the mythological and legendary Leonardo da Vinci's roots that after his leaving leave the painted rag in the wall, with that important discretion leave, the form that fulfills the aim of a painting is the permanent and the unforgotten.
Nebojša Jankov
Autobiography through artistic vision
The impact of Balkans psychology is originally presented in his tables, for which reason he makes you think profoundly with an immortal concept, as an esthetic beauty value, through the specific duality of art language expression which can be trusted to the material endlessness in the picture space and avoided tram the normal lime flow in accordance with the ancient Summer culture which is able to antagonize east west.
Forms found through the memory and reconverted into work, such as traditional and folk that co-operate in a work and are cultivated where the style known as ready made is used.
In Xhevdet Xhafa's ideology co-operate willingness, thought and sense as a triad to build up and establish, through the artistic practice that is always a permanent communication, a space against reality which on the other side negatively responds to the repudiate reality of the everyday life.
His overview gels described by a hiding beauty through the style and materials, consumed by the everyday life of master Xhafa, they treat and conduct artistic messages that cannot be sooner forgotten. His works through the material impulsive power leave you impressed and gradually achieve to affirm his specific talent and style.
He uses traveling as an approach and for comparing modern civilized symbols with the primitive elements.
Through a specific wisdom he knew to use and exploit the reality of this country by using the most modern art methods to create a multi medial art.
Xhevdet Xhafa is not conservative, does not know to repeat himself, says the truth, therefore it is very difficult to stay in the surface imitating the image, he requires more than this thus creating a long way that promises originality and endless creativity.
Zeni Ballazhi
"Some of the clothing used in many of these huge scale pieces, are
very cid hand-crafted garments that refer to the strong textile tradition
in Kosovar/Albanian tradition.
Xhafa provide a new context for these pieces -they have been
preserved in his paintings –and have taken on the feel of artefacts
that have been unearthed –items that have been suppressed or
hidden underground for many years. These works compelled me
to look closely, examine, question my own roots, memory and the
importance of preservation.
There is something very powerful about using items of clothing and
personal possessions in artworks.
These objects have an inherent history, a past, and the work tells
the story of that past in a way that communicates directly with my
body in a very intangible way.
I have never had such a physical response to artwork before. The
sheer scale of these artworks also added to the impact These works
confront, envelop, surround and overwhelm and reminded me that
you cannot escape your past or deny where you are from."
Bronwen Simpson