To express myself through painting is, for me, simultaneously a passion, a mission, and a lifelong profession.
When I speak, I’m never as thoughtful as I am when I paint. Painting is my most natural language and the most honest way for me to communicate with the world.
Many of the themes I explore arise from everyday life, but above all from profound personal experiences and memories that have remained unresolved from my difficult past—especially from the period of the war in Kosovo, which I lived through myself.
These events are not only historical memories; they are wounds, voices, and images that continue to live within me. Through painting, I try to revisit these experiences with respect and responsibility, transforming and artistically modifying them. Their reality is heavy, both in form and in content, so I seek a visual language that can process and soften them while at the same time making them communicable to the public.
For me, art is not only testimony, but also reflection and aesthetic construction.
I want—or I aspire—that every viewer, upon first encountering my work, feels my sincerity and confronts a real story: the people who were killed, those who disappeared, lives unjustly cut short.
Often they return to me in dreams and in waking moments as silhouettes, heads, and fragments of bodies, as if asking not to be forgotten. At times I feel that they have never completely departed into eternity, but continue to live among us, in memory and in conscience.
In my work, I also address universal themes such as human unhappiness, insecurity, anxiety, loneliness, and the desire to leave without a clear destination. In many of the events I try to render in painting, I often find myself personally involved.
Of course, I would like to paint beautiful landscapes and themes filled with light and happiness, but for now the reality that surrounds me guides me toward a different sensibility.
Some art lovers consider these themes heavy—perhaps they are. But for me, they are a lived and true reality. And my art is born precisely from this truth.
With the passage of time, perhaps my approach will also change, because everything remains relative and in motion.
Ongoing thread. More from Agron Bytyçi to follow.
