An Article by Artan Shabani

Artan Shabani

Painting in Albania is a natural symbiosis of the present with the past, it is a powerful research, driven by the sensory interior of its society where its artists, even at a young age, turn stimulating impulses into images, which still in most cases are figures of the languages of modern painting.

Roland Runaj is one of those artists who stands out for an active process in painting developed at the beginning of the 21st century. It is composed of many images, seemingly detached from each other. But their imaginative wholeness becomes clear to the public, as through the elements of the painting it reveals the expressive stimuli, which the artist receives from the facts and subjects of our past. The painter Runaj is not indifferent to that, he even seems to want to bring that back and make it present for many reasons, which are related to the individual who tends to grow even more aware. It tends to connect with our developing society, which it describes as forgetfulness and memory of the collectivism and the communist leader, as well as the deep social problems of existence within the world of crime, violence, racism, Machiavellian unit, sex, war, underestimation of arrogance.

All of Roland Runaj’s pictorial curiosity revolves around the relationship between pictorial texture and its subjects. Not without good reason he has chosen to single out texture as an element, which has organized the form of content. Not without good reason he has brought it to his attention, but also ours, showing us that communist ideology was propaganda and censorship, or control and self-control, which no one displayed the real texture. Today we seek, as people of the world, to touch and get acquainted with the real, that is, the texture that forms the image of the individual and society. And this texture becomes visible and comes to the surface detailed by the constituent dough of the phenomenon, individual or society of different eras. This is a phenomenon that worries the artist, who tries to show us through his painting

The painter selectively shows that he appreciates his new past, but also the old past of the Albanian society. He even sees and singles out different moments of our history, some of which still have an impact on Albanian society and the individual. Sometimes his figure tends to show how they are subject to their effect even today. Runaj, through the clarity of his ideas, concludes that his painting belongs to an imaginary, social and political review of the chaotic Albanian society, which will be one for several decades. And this because of the concrete, daily and necessary changes that happen and should happen over the Albanian society, which went through many serious problems from communism to capitalism, from a isolated society, closed to an open and global society. . For this reason we distinguish moments of cutting ribbons, the existence of monuments and the parade of the military leader.

Roland Runaj has a fortune born along with him and is the color, which behaves like the main character in the painting and which he uses to emphasize the characters on its surface. The characters in his painting are so evident that they convince us of the selection of social and historical facts of our past. They are present as an approach in our memory today. They remind us of the individual left somewhere in the corners of the conscience of each of us, modeled on the smile of the collective conscience and the means of communist propaganda. The characters of the work painted agile, fast, without much detail show the reminiscence of our time with the individual of the past, who also needs some time to be forgotten or transformed into another individual, who will abandon the mask of a smile of meaningless and will tire in the work of personal well-being, to be recorded as a human experience. The artist brings to mind, characters without eyes or with closed eyes, a typical feature of human time nowadays, where the technological potential has included all areas of development and has turned man as a machine placed in front of a screen of of the computer world, has made it colder and has separated it, mainly, from the natural world.

By Artan Shabani

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Artan Shabani

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An Article by Artan Shabani

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