Genti Korini – The Drawing Lesson

”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?
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Genti Korini’s work approaches drawing as the primary language of visual imagination. It allows for the materialization of ideas into sensible forms. It also incorporates it as the link between painting and other spatial materializations of art, such as sculptural forms or photographic images. Thus, drawing becomes designo: designation of reality, but also design. The language of modernist abstraction seems to be at the core of his artistic practice. Abstraction is often used in order to comment on the ideological contexts from which the forms he explores and manipulates are extracted. Such operations are performed with an acute awareness of the ways the political permeates the aesthetic structure of everyday life. His attention to details generates a world of fragments which float in the space like a constellation of signifiers, a networked arrangement without an underlying syntax or composition. Devoid of the immediate context which could anchor these fragments, 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.”

Abstract from the introductory note by Cristian Nae