Emil Bakalli USA

The aim of my work is to penetrate into the very condition that I am trapped in, into the very breach/rift and situation that I am situated in my milieu, in the mode of how I experience and perceive the Things that make up my environment as my world of Things. I “abstract my experience” as being a part of a condition, of a lively plexus, and of spontaneities or occurrences in the reality-of-being-there. I am a part of it, and yet, I am not fully it; which is to say, I am still I as long as I am the wondering and gazing eye.
The most vital and inspirational sources of my visual information are people and/or shifting and continuously changing sequences—instances immerging and dissolving from the public surroundings of a city life like New York (like my daily subway- ride with its colorful wave of overlapping and altering images, the vibe of the crowd and my interaction with it, city’s bustle and hustle, et cetera), where instantaneous forms dissipate or disappear; thus, leaving behind tensions and the mere traces of events as they happen, i.e. staining or living a mark in the experience of my memories. The crowd is a walking silhouette and yet, it becomes the flesh of my colors and the contour of my lines and an indispensible material of my brush; its vitality emerges in my paintings so as to render the invisible rhythms visible. But even more so, my eye “captures” and “isolates” the ubiquitous temper of crowds’ steps amidst the paths of New York City, through which my work evolves and where my thoughts and experiences find a dynamic familiarity of form and line—every single sequence has a unique shattering speed: this is the ground of my painting’s surface. In other words, my artistic rupture takes place in a locality that is enveloped in the presence of a situation/condition. It is the very core of this condition-experience-involvement that my art has evolved and engaged itself as a form and also, let me say; my art is the prosopopoeia / manifestation of this milieu of technological shattering speed, of vibrancy and force, of animation and sensation, of simultaneously emerging and dissolving realities that pass-by me and yet are connatural or build-in-me.
Among all of this visual drifting-mass-of-things, of forms or of anonymous silhouettes, there pervades a sequence of silence as well. The silent world is where we dwell and where our form as form emanates; it is the moment that I see without thinking of things—it has its own form and language. Another way to put it is that, my painterly and performative action of self-affirmation springs from a sober condition of an ecstatic joy of my visual breath. I capture the disclosed and concealed moments and forms of things as they appear to my visualization or to my kinetic eye—this is the “raw-event” of exterior forces, i.e., a condition internalized and then materialized into and onto my worldly-earthly presence.
In short, my paintings are present and have a presence. There is an animation of colors and lines where forms and things emerge and create spasms and sensations. My paintings are real and smell of their oily surface, they are dry and soft, opaque and transparent—they are bold and visceral and lost in disclosure and concealed in forms. The surface is palpable or thick—dark diminutive and murky— bright shinny colors—muddy light—glassy and matt. The dry and the wet linen drips, it ripples, and it undulates—it swirls with curvilinear motions. The violent and the intense activity of the swoosh brush is smashed delicately while dancing schizophrenically— it screams forcefully in space for attention. …

I open my eyes—dull and foggy morning day—the subway is riding on Brooklyn Bridge—my studio is still—it is the only refuge of my artistic utopia—things and events take form—memories become another life.