Anjesa Dellova, « Passages », Paris

The first solo exhibition in France by Anjesa Dellova (b. Kosovo, 1994) is entitled Passages. A sober word, it evokes as much the traversing of a place as it does a state of metamorphosis. In Sans titre gallery, the artist presents eighteen monochrome paintings in variations of vibrant orange, arranged on the ground, one following another, echoing the elongated architecture of the site. This arrangement extends the idea of a corridor or path that the visitor is invited to take, almost in procession, between figures that seem to float in suspense in the space.

For several years, Anjesa Dellova has been developing a technique that she calls frottage: a dry application of oil paint on canvas primed in advance with a textured white. Through an infinitely repeated gesture, thin layers of material accumulate and gradually reveal silhouettes. Outlines are drawn in successive contrasts and erasures, just as memory is often born from what is erased. This frottage is not only a technical process, but a veritable ritual, wherein the artist “scratches” the surface to reveal a face, a gesture, a body. Reduced to the essentials, these bodies seem to emerge from a colored mist, as if they came to us from another time.

It was during her research on Albanian traditions and customs that Anjesa Dellova discovered the Gjama, a collective male funeral ritual that combines song, lamentations and choreographed gestures. Her first series sought to represent the codified dimension of this mourning rite, whose expressive intensity suffuses the body’s physical memory. With Passages, the artist enacts a decentering: rather than limiting herself to painting the Gjama, she illustrates the very idea of lamentation in an ensemble of figures that seem to move in a flurry of stupor or sadness, without it being possible to determine the precise moment that inspired them.

This moment is a crisis, a fracture in which an emotion of theatrical intensity is expressed. The gestures, at once incomprehensible and abstract, translate this instability, like a desperate attempt to contain an overwhelming pain. There remains a sort of mystery about what is happening; the gestures are ambiguous: hands stretched into the void, heads bowed, legs bent – so many postures that we intuit are simultaneously ritualistic and private, translating the vulnerability of a body torn between swooning and abandon.

These characters are neither gendered nor clearly identifiable: they float outside of time, dressed in simplified finery, sometimes reminiscent of folk traditions. Their voluntary uniformity, rendered in the rigor of monochrome, invites us to concentrate on pure emotion rather than the particularity of this or that detail of attire or anatomy. The result is a feeling of universality, as if we were witnessing a dramaturgy common to all cultures: the confrontation with loss, absence, the unknown.

Yet the series is not limited to a commentary on death or ritual. Dellova suggests an infinite space of renewal, where each canvas constitutes a variation, a chapter in a series destined to continue. The eighteen paintings in Passages are its most recent manifestation; they mark the manner in which the artist creates a dialogue between an ancient ritual and her own pictorial ritual. In this encounter, the silhouettes affirm as much a lamentation as an uprising, and the gallery space offers itself as an initiatory corridor where memory and the present intertwine.

The echo between the configuration of the space and the pictorial series reinforces the impression of a march towards the unknown, or of a secular liturgy in which each visitor is free to find his or her place. The passages in question here are therefore multiple: a passage from one tradition to another, from a technique to an emotion, from the individual to the community, from life to death or rebirth. At the end of the journey, all that remains is the resonance of the gestures and glances that the artist has been able to make palpable, like a song that continues to vibrate long after it has died away.

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This exhibition, organized jointly with the gallery LambdaLambdaLambda from Prishtina, which presents the works of Blerta Hashani, Brilant Milazimi and Lui Shtini, aims to offer a perspective on contemporary artists from the Balkans and on rites and traditions linked to Balkan cultures.

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Anjesa Dellova (born in 1994, Prizren) lives and works in Lausanne. She received her MFA from the HEAD (Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design), Geneva in 2020 with the congratulations of the jury and before, a BFA from ECAL (Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne) in 2017.

She is the winner of the Leenaards Cultural Grant (2024); the Alice Bailly Grant (2023) and the Kiefer Hablitzel & Göhner Prize (2022). In 2018, she was an artist-in-residency at Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina.

Selected solo exhibitions include Musée Jenisch, Vevey (2024); Mayday, Basel (2023); Tunnel Tunnel, Lausanne (2023); Valentin61, Lausanne (2023); Abstract, Lausanne (2021).

Dellova has participated in group exhibitions at Maison Tavel - MAH | Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, Geneva (upcoming, 2025); Clubhaus (in collaboration with Kunsthaus Zurich) (2024); Espace Arlaud, Lausanne (2024); Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster (2024); Dacodac, Zurich (2024); Amore, Basel (2024); Kunsthalle Zurich (2023); Associazione +41, Tessin (2023); CACY - Centre Art Contemporain, Yverdon (2023); National Gallery of Kosovo, Prishtina (2023); Halle 1, Messe Basel, Basel (2022); Jungkunst, Winterhur (2022); Wunderkammer, Lausanne (2019); KASKO, Basel (2019).

Anjesa Dellova’s works are featured in the collections of the City of Lausanne (Switzerland) and La Poste (Switzerland).