Dancers, 2022 and 2023
Oil on canvas
Courtesy Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection
Dancers is a series of paintings which stems from Adrian Paci’s research around rituals and the collective act of celebration, portrayed through the lens of found footage, amateur videos, and cinema d’auteur. Trained in painting at the Art Academy of Tirana in the early 1990s, Paci developed a very personal approach to the medium. For the artist, the use of existing images as subjects of his paintings becomes an occasion to analyse the withdrawal of subjective authorship and to explore the enigma and ambiguity of the image, further liberating figurative painting from its representational and ideological duties. Dancers is based on stills from diverse sources: videos of weddings and celebratory rituals in Albania, films d’auteur, and frames taken from various documentaries. The continuous human presence, moments of daily life, and bodies that fade into phantom-like figures are among the recurring elements. These subjects belong to an existential theatre, where the familiar nature of tradition blends with an erratic sense of unpredictability—evoking feelings of dislocation, loss, and the rediscovery of one’s origins. From Paci’s painted gestures rises something profound: a sense of awakening shaped by ancient memories and cultural echoes, now finding renewed life on the artist’s canvas.
Drawing on his own experience of immigrating from Albania to Italy and on stories from family and friends, Paci addresses issues such as exile, identity, memory, and collective history. Paci’s body of work looks back on those tumultuous times, addressing the radical political shifts in his homeland as it transitioned away from communism to a chaotic free-market economy, and his subsequent experiences as an artist in exile. Using diverse media, Paci reflects on the condition of migration with immediacy and irony. Through his work, Paci inserts himself into social situations, engaging both private and public life in an effort to discover – or recover – how we live. By creating works situated in the everyday, he reveals how our lives are interconnected and shaped by our physical boundaries.
Adrian Paci was born in Shkodër, Albania, in 1969. He lives and works between Milan and Shkodër.
