Prima Center Berlin

TURBULENCE IN THE CORE OF THINGS
Emil Aleksiev

The life of the world should be understood through the life of our heart. Antonin Artaud

The blue crystal ball into which our world had been trapped rolled down the open palm of a dead god and crashed. Crystal spheres shattered and pieces of broken glass flew all around. The world was free and suddenly endless dark sky appeared above us. The earth has started its lonesome trip through infinity.
The world used to be a whole. Man was the center of the world and it pulsated in the rhythm of his heart. The earth was motionless, with nine concentric crystal spheres orbiting around it. The first seven were the planets; the eighth was the sky of motionless stars and the ninth was the crystal sky, called the First Rule, enveloped by the Empyrean, which is pure light. This complex mechanism of moving crystal spheres, empty and transparent, that could have been fifty or five, suddenly stopped and broke down. Pieces of broken glass are still flying around us.
The image of our world since the Middle Ages has been that of bursting and explosive expanding. The perfection of the precise and complete vision of the universe (the image of the world in medieval manuscripts is most often described by the word speculum- mirror) is impossible today. The universe is no longer harmonious – it is teribilita – disparate and dissonant world. The harmony of heavenly spheres is now a chaos of broken pieces of the mirror that disappear into the open chasm. Nothing can really be reflected in the mirror or in the abyss (which is its constant replica).
Jean Baudrillard announced the rule of nothing outside the reach of the phenomenal world. The simulation of reality hides “the absence of things from themselves; the fact that things do not happen even though they seemingly happen; the fact that everything withdraws and hides behind itself and is never equal to itself.” Spectacularized reality is reality based on media shows that are so powerful that cover up the fact that reality does not exist any more. The crime has been committed. The spectacle is also a speculum (mirror); a system of broken glasses that make the image of the world fractioned, fragmented and incomprehensible in its intermedial indeterminacy. These broken images that obsess more and more our consciousness are not just an expression of the immanent possibilities of the media, but models according to which reality is perceived: the relationships, norms and rules of our spectacularized reality. It is a world view that has been materialized.
In art, the orgy of modernism consisted of the joy of deconstruction of things and their representation. The original desire of mimesis becomes mimesis of the mimesis, a difficult task for the simulacrum, where works of art portray reality by means of intertextual mechanics; field references relate to signs that have already been produced in a previous work and in this intrinsic practice reality is abandoned in favour of signs that represent their own reality. What can art, actually, mean in such a world that has previously been spectacularized, cool, transparent and propagandistic?
Standing on the edge of the world’s abyss, under the dark and empty sky, the artist faces a difficult task: to recreate the world. The artist should create the way nature or god creates. If the artist abandons their work – it will fall down again in the abyss and darkness. The world is an image that has to be recreated. Only then the artist rediscovers that the world pulsates in the beat of their heart, the way Shqipe Mehmeti has done.
In Shqipe Mehmeti’s works, we are faced again with the secret of creation. She is trying to discover the true images, the images behind the broken mirror of the world, the images behind all other images. These images are quintessential. They are images where passing and volatile forms, futile presentations and superficial changes are discarded, left out – they discover the essence of things.
Shqipe Mehmeti creates her pictures from fine arts’ innermost matter: the elements of which the world was made – water, air, earth and fire. The four elements, according to the Hellenic philosopher Empedocles, are the basis of all things. Everything is created by a combination of these elements. Love (affinity) is the power that enables their union.
Darkness is the basis of all the images. The commotion announcing chaos starts in the darkness. Terrible forces govern the image. They are opposed and what we see is the outcome of their clash. What suffers here is the matter. The image is defined by the Sanskrit word ma (mag, magh and mat) – womb, ovary, origin, beehive, hotbed, magma, mesh, stomach, rising dough, honey, honeycomb, matrix… The image is a sensitive body that quivers, spreads, writhes, bends, flows, swells and grows. It is a kind of transcendental neutrality, la neutralitè transcedante, which allows space for all the forms, spreading into space, infinitude of all shaping possibilities, proto-figurality, proto-picturality and gestual proto-matrix – and it is from this and from the painter’s “hysteria” that a new optic and haptic reality is created and awoken figurality rises from the abyss onto the surface of the painting.
… And then heavy and foaming sea appears in the picture, deep and dark water with what is hidden in its depths; the wonders of the world agitated in the fever of creation; water that is heavy and pregnant with life; amazing water still hiding its unshaped world from which everything begins; then earth appears, heavy with treasures, in which forces of creation lie dormant, where empty spiral husks are filled with new life, where life thrives and branches into countless sprouts, where veins of minerals sparkle in the darkness and ores grow like embryos; air gushes like the breadth of new life over the earth, air like the substance dreams are made of, full of apparitions and ghosts, space where one can fly, space for opportunities, clouds and new shapes in dizzying winds, whirls of storm and roaring thunders; and finally, the fire of transformation, fire of changes, fire that turns the world into an alchemist’s vessel and smelting furnace of the spirit.
In Shqipe Mehmeti’s works, dead matter is living spirit. The cosmos is alive. Art is renewal of the eternal life, says Michel Henry. The world is a huge subjective composition and therefore there is no world without feelings, without a set of stimulations that make up our sensitivity and cause it to flutter the way the body of the cosmos does. Where matter ends, mystery starts. Thus, the art work becomes the place of love and recreation of the universe.
Emil Aleksiev