JON KRAJA | Sublime Miracle

JON KRAJA | Sublime Miracle
Series: Symphony of Mockery 2023

“I definitely am a contradiction! I have two contradictory ideas in my head, and I believe in them both.
I like them both, and they both let me down.
I see myself trying hard to keep the balance between them and find myself bending backward doing all sorts of acrobatics on the thinnest possible filament, yet managing to bring together the ends of my creativity: paradise and hell alike.”

Jon Kraja (b.1970) is an Albanian artist working on painting, sculpture, installation, and set design. He emerged in the art scene in the 90’s, after the fall of communism in Albania, producing surprising concepts in set design and working on large-scale gestural abstract and figurative painting. He is known for his constant personal research in identifying new ways of expression and experimenting with materials and media.
Jon Kraja is preoccupied with the unknown and the utility of lifeless objects. “I believe art is about one’s heart rather than one’s brain,” says he while asked to define his art.
Jon Kraja has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Albania, Italy, Greece, Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and the USA.

“I am a painter, and I like painting the beauty. Beauty immediately captures one’s senses. That is why I am always curious about the state it propels people into. When I find myself before beauty, I am a mere spectator waiting for that sublime miracle to happen.
According to Kant, one likes beauty for no particular reason or idea. One just likes it.
Full-stop. A great painting leaves you awestruck.
I cannot express myself in front of a beautiful work of art. Whether it is a gestural, figurative, or abstract painting does not matter to me. What matters to me is the magic it conveys.”

This series of paintings is called the Mockery cycle. As I started 2-3 years ago, it was not called Mockery. It was a different atmosphere and situation then. Interestingly, I have focused quite a lot on hands here. The inspiration came when I visited the Musee d’Orsay and saw Courbet’s The Origin of the World. At the time, it seemed to me to be more than pornography, and such values withstand the test of time and are always a source of inspiration for what I like tremendously, what we call mystery.
A painting is beautiful even though its beauty cannot be conceptualized.
In this day and age, people see a lot and only feel a little. I would like the viewer to feel emotions from my paintings rather than obtain meaning. As is the case with music.
I believe art is about one’s heart rather than one’s brain.
As Karl Jaspers says: “When we are in front of a work of art, we behave as if we are admiring a pearl, and yet we forget that the PEARL is the smudge left behind by the irritant that has wounded the shell in the first place. The wound is the artist’s sacrifice to contaminate him with this craziness.”

The series of paintings, Symphony of Mockery by Jon Kraja, are time lapses of our daily life where everything and everyone: beauty, television, show, backstage, carnival, social media, Disney hero, and politics, seem engaged in a mocking role.
Jamming the images is a futile effort that only empowers the fantasies. The artwork is built by constructing and deconstructing the image. The brutal spillover of the color destroys the figure and the original order, provoking the chaos that delivers the final image. Jon Kraja introduces in this series a gestural, central black and white, irregular line
“I don’t know if it is a frequency of energy, a childhood flashback of the jamming image, as seen in the TV, or
a fragment of heart ECG. But I know that it helps me to tell a story on multiple levels.”
Symphony of Mockery depicts moments of the constant and never-ending mocking of human performance under the lights of chandeliers, wondering if Mockery has become our only way to communicate.

Series: Brut@l Elegance, 2019

This series of paintings in acrylic and two sculptures made from recycled materials from the artist’s latest cycles. Jon Kraja brings his personal quest for beauty to a consumerist and over-polluted world. If in his paintings, he finds beauty in the rapid casting of colors and the unpredictability created in the collision between them; in the sculptures, he researches the sensitivity of the shapes resulting from the deformation of plastic bottles, a process of hand manipulation that the artist conducts himself. As the artist says, the result of the transformation process reminds him of the subtleness of the draperies of old masters’ sculptures. In both the paintings and the sculptures, there is a demand for a balance between the instantaneous and brutal act of creating and displaying the fragility and the details carefully preserved to reach the entirety of the artwork.

Gallery70 provides a space for promotion and career development to established, emerging, and young artists, hosting an international exhibition program and facilitating international artist exchange and mobility.
Its excellent location at the very heart of the city of Tirana in Albania, with
a triangular shape and an eight-meter large window display, offers artists and curators the challenge of experimentation and site-specific installation.
Gallery70 aims to create a sustainable network of partner galleries, museums, and private collectors to contribute to its artist’s empowerment.

Gallery70 Established in March 2017 | Privately owned Mailing address: Rr. Abdi Toptani at Toptani Center Ground Floor, Tirana, Albania | +355 6920 41859
email: lauresha.basha@gallery70.art
Website: gallery70.art

See the full article in Art Market Magazine Issue #81