One of the Kosovar modernist painters whose artistic careers have developed outside of Kosovo, Daut Berisha [1946-2023], is among the most famous as a name but his work, paradoxically, is almost unknown. If one looks for information about his art in the few respectable publications on modern art in Kosovo, one can only find a few reproductions of the work “Triptych” from 1980, and a few reproductions from the so-called “Blue Cycle”. Here and there, you can also eventually find poor-quality reproductions of some paintings and sculptures, as well as articles and journalistic reports on exhibitions in France, where he lived and worked for years.
The most reproduced work of Daut Berisha is “Triptych” [1980], published in the monograph “Contemporary Art of Kosovo” [GAK, 1988]. In “Triptych”, the influence of Francis Bacon is clearly noticeable even from the title itself, because this British painter had the habit of painting the motifs in three parallel paintings, with different perspectives. Daut did not faithfully follow Bacon’s emblematic brutalism with the depictions of the human body in a state of distortion resembling the freshly slaughtered meat that is still dripping with blood in a slaughterhouse, but preferred a softened figuration with arched and sensual shapes—not in a state of sadness from the internal implosion that appeared in Bacon, but as scenes of sadness seen from the outside, in dehumanized social environments, images of the wretched and unfortunate of the world. The titles of the works that Dauti gave them are also depressing: “Darkness”, “Dead Alley”, and similar ones, that suggest a feeling of existential despair. Even another painting, among the few I have seen, despite the title “The Light of Hope”, does not really arouse optimism at all. In this painting, an aura of light is seen spreading from the window of an attic where three people are sitting under the window, hunched over as if in anguish, with their heads buried between their knees, as if hopeless, although, paradoxically—and this is perhaps the subtle message of the painter—those poor people, if they were to open their eyes, would see how close they have the light of hope!
Shkëlzen Maliqi
Ekspozita është përkrahur nga Ministria e Kulturës, Rinisë dhe Sportit
