Plastic Assembly: A riot of colors that takes over

The first thing that strikes you about Mentor Berisha's paintings, organized in four cycles for four historical moments of this popular whirlwind, is that they – the paintings – always appear as plastic inns for this sensational arrival of the countless people under the pressure of their own denial. On the exhibition “Collective Effervescence” by the painter Mentor Berisha, opened on April 16, 2026 at the Pristina Prison Museum – The Prison of the Ideal

Historically, image has been an issue for Albanians.

The image and history of the people, each a problem for the other. Sometimes, the absence of one seems to determine the absence or poverty of the other, sometimes the opposite: as if the more modest, the more unassuming one is, the noisier, the more violent the other. Or the other...

It is said that in the 18th century, the Englishman Gibbon, who wrote "The History of Rome", had named the historical situation of this people on the stage of public appearances and knowledge, as that of a stain, darker even than the heart of African darkness. In the 19th century, an iron Prussian chancellor had put the seal of great power on this invisibility, irrevocably imprinting on it the stamp of "geographical expression".

The Italian lights of the Luce Institute, in the 20th century, seem to have recorded only pleats and fustanella, while the cinema that came from Moscow, in most cases, only partisans, factories and parades. The folkloric image of the people, from the outside, and its quadratic image from the inside.

Meanwhile, the world became comfortable with the quote "the most isolated country in Europe," about which almost nothing was known.

But the dogmatic sleep of the historical image had been disturbed for some time, and after a great absence as a people since the "great time" of Skanderbeg, Albanians decided to finally wake up and flood the stage of history with fury as a people, tearing apart its frames.

The plebs are that irrepressible collective energy, a turbulent being of the multitude of bodies, that comes from time to time to dismantle the frameworks of history where the people are denied.

Much more than a question of the image of Albanians “in the descriptions of foreign travelers” – the new collective sport of the post-90s – the historical image of the people is a question of this dialectic between the forbidden people and their collective whirlwind in search of a stage, a force in search of a form, a source of vitality in their awakenings, which seeks where to roar – how to make the ground a place of assembly – and to enter and remain in their own history.

The first thing that strikes us about Mentor Berisha's paintings, organized into four cycles for four historical moments of this popular whirlwind, is that they - the paintings - appear each time as plastic inns for this sensational arrival of countless people under the pressure of their own denial.

The artist works in cycles, with variations, within a number of constraints that he seems to have imposed on himself – few colors, unity of brushstrokes, anonymity of figures, unity of style. Many of them seem like reworked versions of each other, where repetition seems like a figure of differentiation, just as the collective that is recreated in its “repeats” (as the poet Krenar Zejno says) is always the same, resumed with other sounds, regained with the same colors.

The re-taking of the plastic scene of the popular phenomenon, within each cycle, and from one to the next, is thus an attempt to be faithful, in the artistic gesture, to the plurality of assemblies, as a fragile and repeated form of the consistency of the people. Fragile, both when it is resistance, and when it implies aggressiveness and violence.

There are two artistic gestures of painting in the face of multiplicity: the baroque one, which attempts to include everything within the painting – and the expressive one, which repeats and retrieves the same motif from one painting to another.

The four cycles draw a circular unity, without any particular orientation, and it is up to each viewer to build their own journey between them to unfold the rhythm of history. From the demonstrations of 81, a classic and iconic moment of a people's uprising, to the massive exile during the war, an extreme moment of its erasure and denial. From the forgiveness of bloodshed in the public expanse of the fields of Kosovo, to the miners' strike, in the darkness of the underground.

The date of the events referred to is not necessarily the most important in the process of reading them, nor is it the best solution for orienting yourself in them.

The logic of painting is plastic and, if we believe our reading, the coincidences resonate more among the colors, the rhythms, the tension redrawn each time a (human) mass – given, denied, in the making – tries to make room for itself, to take the ground that belongs to it from the contingent ground it is found in. To make it “human” (as the poet Gentian Çoçoli once told us), that is, to mix a little ground with as much horizon as possible.

Only in this way does reality, which is clearly referenced and intended here, manage to make a splash in the picture – and thus recognize the splash of history.

demonstrations

It is not for nothing that the word has a visual meaning, as a reinforced form of coming to the fore, despite denial.

It is the most numerous cycle, perhaps the central one, and here a strong structuring of the representations is observed. The division is frequent into foreground and background, near and far, sometimes with a third plane, as a barely-horizon. Darkness often in the foreground, lower plane, light and redness in the ascent and retreat.

This foreground is often dark, as if occupied (occupied, once literally occupied by the police who turn their backs on us) and enters into tension with the bodies standing in front of it. A plastic thread thus starts and is drawn from the dark foreground to the forms of its lighting and coloring, to become a stage for the bodies.

Sometimes, too, the figuration of the collective takes on a three-tiered rhythm. Somewhere the light rhythms from below, like a film strip (black and white), to the top where it explodes and spreads like a common foam – but after passing through the dialectical obscuration of the body, more precisely of the trunk as its opaque part. That foam is an ontological form of the habitation of plurality, we recall from the texts of P. Sloterdijk, in search of the dynamic-plastic description of being.

From the strip of individual feet, to the foamy level of the bed, we move from the black and white rhythm, to a white-on-gray plume, something between the snowflake people and the suspension of fog.

The same scene is offered to us in another version, where the central vertical axis seems compressed under the pressure of the sides – until it provokes the deflagration of yellow. We must follow the adventures of yellow, if we want to feel the artist's plastic adventure.

When he decides to enter (or open the door to, to indulge in?) color, it seems as if a massive reminder of tradition is imposed on the painter, who figures as a "descent", coming directly from Onufri. The countless flood seeks its form almost beyond history, and beyond the national history of art. Berisha is not interested in the portraits of Idromeno, nor the elegant illuminations of Mio, but he needs to rediscover the theological "framework" of Onufri and the drama of his color, as he figures the place of places, the relationship of the sky, of the aboveground with the underworld, and the movement of countless humanity through them.

Nothing individual stands out anymore, except the colorful fury of the mass in the square of its emergence – in its flattening, almost in its flattening.

The mass here seems like an unstoppable visual movement of itself, a wave after wave of brushstrokes, saturating the entire space of the painting, so awkwardly trapped within the frame that it tries not to be arbitrary.

But the flood is already oriented, not directionless, and the crowd emits the (yellow/orange) light of its location: from left to right, from bottom to top, from the ground to the horizon.

Trepça: interior/exterior

Here, there is no horizon, necessarily. The fact is plastic. The solution, therefore, will also be plastic: the background must then become the horizon!

The circular depiction of the mining pit produces the scene of its own appearance: sometimes as a well, sometimes as a ring, sometimes as an arena.

The Trepça cycle, with its strong formal unity dictated by the enclosed space and the visual code of the miner character (with helmet and headlamp on his head), seems to take the scene through the entire spectrum of possible variations: from the almost total abstraction of the aggressive explosion of colors, to the centripetal swirl of brushstrokes (blue, yellow, red/brown); from the magma of colors, from which the miner's silhouette barely emerges, to the bubbling of some like the fading shadows of survivors, to the semi-circular space of the assembly, finally achieved in plastic.

And then the hut turns into an Ode!

Forgiveness of bloodshed

Of the three other events that all take place in spring, The Forgiveness of Blood seems to most inherently signify spring, revival, and the air of the meadows. Perhaps that is why it is the most meteorological of the series.

Here, the horizon, as a plastic category of the figuration of the people in their coming/rising, seems given, promised from the beginning, with the presence of azure blue.

The dialectic here is twofold: between the (political) question of the horizon, which seems to be resolved (plastically), guaranteed by the new dimension of blue, and the question – which is now more acute – of the people’s assembly scene. Acute, because here the people are concerned with themselves, with the question of their unity, and they demand their place for themselves. The variation is not figurative-colorful, as in the case of Trepça (where unity was given); it does not go from the intensity of the abstract explosion, without figure, to the calm circular outline of the Chamber, but is numerical: the relationship between one, two, and plurality.

It is understandable why: the unique figure of Anton Çetta is the vertical thrust that should provoke the rise of the two men and their union in the embrace of reconciliation, in front of (or in the bosom of) the gathered community. The stability of this scene is always at risk, the tension can be extreme, to the point of passing into an abstraction of colors in the open sky – but slowly the abstraction of noise turns into decorum, the reddish riot of colors in the tapestry, mosaic or stained glass lit up, something like a Harlequin cloak, and, simultaneously with the blue, the vertical rise of the signatories, the two-become-one, brings with it the scene that surrounds it, that radiates from this source: the assembly is possible again!

Exodus

Yellow and red, both already threatening, dominate the Exodus cycle.

An episode that is difficult to imagine (imaginable), with few images/tableaux, as if a kind of steppe, an essential reluctance still operates in the face of trauma. Exile, the violent displacement, without color, is also the risk of the final loss of every place, of every refuge where the people can reveal themselves, come to their aid.

Under the scorching threat of hostile colors – red and yellow are just approaching to ignite – it seems as if the popular substance is completely hidden in the calcined opacity of black. But, unlike the common trunk of the demonstrations, the opacity here is without dialectics, or only in anticipation of it – it is a darkening of the stump: a colorless color of unity, absorption and rejection of every foreign color, a charcoal-etching of mourning, but also a force that opens the way to exile.

It is the backbone of the community!