Giacometti, Halilaj and the common homeland

Paris,

Petrit Halilaj was born in 1986 in Kostërrc, so he is too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, but he is a good connoisseur of the episodes lived in the early nineties in ancient Yugoslavia: ethnic conflicts, war, forced exiles, uprooting … that are part of their personal history, because he had to flee with his family to a refugee Kosovo

Although in his work he has tried to reject nostalgia for his first home, and the pathos of his adolescence, to offer an optimistic vision of his future and that of his country, those experiences help the spectator to understand many things, such as his tendency to raise stories in which personal and social relations unfold in spaces of freedom, where they fit the game and lightness. Some of their current sculptures and facilities are nourished by their children’s drawings; His onirismo refers to childhood, a feature that links his concerns apart from the production of Alberto Giacometti.

Both authors are joined by this spring the Second Institute in Paris: Taking The palace at four in the morning (1932) As a starting point for a subtle network of ties between the two, the exhibition “Nous builds a fantastic Palais la nuit…” underlines the expressive force of those fantastic and fragile constructions that are the works of (almost all) artists. In a montage conceived by Halilaj himself, creations meet in which it is possible to intuit dreams, fears and interests of common roots and the powerful desire to communicate them, unsafe existences in convulsive times and the possibility of inventing as an escape door.

The bases of the project are the claim of childhood as a source and as a footprint in compositions of the adult artist, not only in his drawings; the deployment in the work of both of the family relationships that are everything at that stage; and the study of the transposition of the graphic vocabulary of the paper to the sculpture and the three dimensions -taking as manifestations The cange (1950) or Apollon (1929)- and the importance of the scale when apprehending reality. Halilaj has carried out, specifically for the occasion, about thirty pieces in which he wanted to dissect the childish origin of his AbeTarea special drawing mode that has become an individual expression, and the value of its earliest strokes as a testimony of the panorama in which it had to grow; When exhibiting together with selected works by Giacometti, they enhance in contemplation what in the latter are close to innocence, yearnings, unpublished associations of ideas.

It was Giacomo (Angelo) Poly, a psychologist who attended Halilaj in the Albanian refugee field to which he had to move, who detected his inclination for drawing and his ability to perform it with both hands: it was his means to testify to the trauma of the war and also to overcome it. Little by little he became his favorite language and that of AbeTare It was the denomination that he wanted to give him since 2015, specifically referring to the possibility of transforming the drawings of children into drawings in space. The exhibition recalls that in Geneva, where Giacometti was held in 1941 because of World War II, the artist watched and portrayed his mother and his nephew Silvio in drawings and sculptures; In some notebooks, in addition, he practiced a very original exercise: he invited the child to draw on leaves in which he had previously drawn his silhouette. Adult and crío spoke thus in four -handed designs, of a particular grace … that Halilaj tried to replicate with his niece Luna.

In the main hall of the Giacometti Institute it has been deployed Le Palaisthat we can understand as a monumental drawing of the Kosovar in space and inside whose theoretically distant moments and ideas are associated in the trajectory of the author of The man who walks; Allows you to enter in relation Couple (1926), Mère et Fille (1933), Apollon (1929) and a children’s drawing that copied in 1932. He clearly refers to Le Palais à 4 Heures du Matinwhose elaboration in turn refers to memories of the artist: We built a fantastic palace at night … A very fragile Palace of matches: to the slightest false movement, an entire part of the small building collapsed. We always started it again. He referred, by the way, himself and a woman with whom he lived for six months and who, in his words, was able to make every moment an enchantment -he has identified it with one of his lovers, Denise; In 1933 he confessed to André Breton that he was unable to do something that did not have to do with her.

That constructive vulnerability, for Halilaj, connects with the own of all the houses that he and his family had to abandon and that they would try to rebuild: in Runik, in Pristina. The idea of lifting a dream home for this exhibition soon occurred; Prepare his palace, to Giacometti, did not take more than a day, after having exactly imagined each of its parts.

Petrit Halilaj/ Alberto Giacometti. Nous buildings a fantastique blade la nuit ... Fondation giacometti, 2025

During the parallels, Halilaj benefited when he was a child of his mother’s unconditional support to his artistic vocation; The same thing happened to Giacometti, but also with his father. The father figure is important for both of us, but in a different way: their positions oscillate between reverence and the challenge. In Paris the Kosovar presents Abetare (the Giacometti rooster)who takes the form of a mocking character who looks towards a portrait of Giovanni Giacometti, the artist’s father, and AbeTare (The talkative)another drawing in which Borgonovo’s covers the portrait of his father of imaginary sculptures. Just the Portrait of the father (1927-1930) by Giacometti is one of those hybrid pieces between drawing and sculpture that can connect with proposals of that type in the young artist.

Discover in the stores of the Giacometti Foundation the metal structures that give rise to the post -war sculptures of Giacometti impressed Halilaj due to the proximity they kept with their own vocabulary of forms, such as the AbeTare and their filiform sculptures or I like reminding you – Struthio Camelus (2024). In them he found the essence of sculpture and his limits, in his black monochrome lines it seemed to elucidate when a sculpture becomes such: I am very interested in the idea of a sculpture that does not occupy space. No volume.

In the manner of those essential structures of Giacometti, in theory mere compendiums of material, Halilaj works as Peut-on Faire quelque chose ensemble, Simplement ça, et desuite free pour toujours (Blanc) (2011) use light forms such as twigs and feathers; They suggest an evocative lightness of the vacuum, even antecedent of their own disappearance.

In relation to the scales, that other great theme of this exhibition, does not remember that Giacometti translated the greatness of man in modest or even very modest dimensions. For him, as for Halilaj, the small did not imply a lower expressive capacity when referring to human affairs.