The Storm 473 (2017) Painting by Visar Mulliqi

Visar Mulliqi was born and raised in Pristina, Former Republic of Yugoslavia. Visar’s art is in line with gestural abstraction, with strong color accents. His work is characterized by abstractness and use of color contrast that easily attracts attention. His paintings often transmit optimism, leaving the viewer intrigued by the structure, texture and the combination of color. Visar is strongly present in the cultural life of his environment and inspired by a certain expressionist tradition (most distinguished, his father Muslim Mulliqi, one of the greatest painters of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia at the time). Visar Mulliqi’s gesturalism comes from the figurative experience that evolved in autonomy of signs that move through pictorial field more and more independent of the surface on which they appear. The complementary element of the appeared structure is obviously color, especially in its primary shades, with their intensities and optical volumes, which absorb the gaze as a membrane between the impression and imagination. In this sense, Visar avoids symbolic connotations and highlights the concept of pictorial self-reflection by act of the painting itself. Beyond all allusive meanings, his paintings focus on the phenomenology of perception and relational dynamics of colored surfaces. The color patterns are formed by the will of the painter as well as his inner impulses and they do not imitate any “natural” entity. In this context, the color remains the mysterious meaning of the visible and, above all, the indicator of unexpected containing the act of seeing or, if we borrow accuracy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this fact tells us that “nothing is more difficult than knowing what we really see”. From the various registers offered by the painting and the work of the painter, Visar reveals his particular imagination, resulting from a thorough study in an environment where he was formed and of which he is heir. With his sensibility, this heritage has become a non-figurative visual discourse, a language without words, without descriptive narrative, seeking its syntax in the silent subtlety of emotions generated by brush strokes on the color matter. His images appear before viewer’s eyes, moved by their indescribable suggestiveness, such as arbitrary statements, independent of the logic outside of the painted surface. What the artist seeks is an order of pure relationships that are placed in a world apart, in the aesthetic field, which compared to natural objects is their both, the first and last. The space of art can organize such relations in its own way, to articulate the spatial and temporal data according to an individual projection that can be considered a permanent invention whose only rule is to not have rules. Currently, he is working as a Painting Professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Pristina, where he has contributed with his knowledge and skills since 1995.

• Nationality: SERBIA
• Date of birth : 1966
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Serbian Artists