Kujtim Buza
A Model of Harmonious Beauty
I came to know the painting of Pashk Pervathi since his paint-full brush spread broadly on the canvas (fibre) as he modelled his impression out of the landscape of Lezhe, where he lived and keeps living and creating. His still life paintings, like "Flowers" (1985), the landscapes like "Drini and Lezhe" (1985), "The Boats" (1985), portraits like "The Gypsy" (1985) and "Portrait of a Boy" impressed me deeply. I was stunned to see the boy from Lezhe knew how to create lasting impressions with deftness, plasticity, solidity and spatiality as freely as a born impressionist. There were quite some momentous conditions to his painting as it burst wildly and took one by surprise with the virtuosity of a visible talent.
Thanks to the intuition of a born artist, Pashk painted portraits as he did the flowers, the flowers just like the landscapes, and the landscapes as if he was their own God. He did shake while facing nature and his hands moved exactly like they should have. The broken tones flowed freely on the palette-modelled colour on big planes that respected nature in a most attractive way in accordance with the best models he selected with sharpness. It was thanks to these traits that he attracted attention and had his works exhibited for the first time in 1979 at a national exhibition when he was just a high school pupil. He took part in later exhibitions and showed his works in two personal exhibitions, reaching a landmark that served as an incitement and indispensability to attend the Academy of Arts, a difficult step for a talent that did not know about programmes, codes and competition tricks. I recall the only advice I gave him: show yourself; paint the man (the model) just like you paint nature. I felt really good that he had stored among his numerous works, letters and mementoes of his youth and school years a letter of mine dated October 7, 1986 wishing all the best luck for starting school. It ended with an embrace from colleagues-to-be. Schooling completed and formed the artist who knocked with sincerity on the heavy gates of art along with his wife and family, burdens that require devotion and understanding.
In the period following his studies, he structured and sharpened his artistic focus, created his own artistic profile and dug into the foundations of impressionistic poetry, shedding there all his stormy creative vitality. Upon his "testing" at school and away from class, Pashk Pervathi started making a name for himself and came to be counted in exhibitions as a landscapist with individual artistic potential. He switched from the soft and approximate tones into creating the architecture of a structure with a more intensive colour, with new emotional value as he passed on more level planes and remained melancholy, ever beautiful and emotional. He reminds me of the period when the great Cézanne, unhappy with the impressionistic observation of nature, sought to construct and jump from the loyal attitude to the feelings and senses to something more solid and stable. Since the year 1990, Pashk sought -- with the landscape directly from "The Coast of Himara" -- to discover something more. He quit the realistic or impressionistic positions to bring expressive constructions on the canvas and he became more focused. The structure of his painting, as a logical consequence of the previous creativity, developed a higher quality and his monumental approaches are now filtered in interpretations of stable symbolical ideas. Metaphors came into his painting as it turned more philosophical and touching, but it still remained beautiful. Now he is seeking to extract as many expression possibilities as possible from one theme and this is manifested in his play with stones, boats, horses and plots of land, among other objects. The brushes of Pashk Pervathi, once a firecracker exploding on a coastal skyline, are now more contained but still full of intensity and his motifs find their place on masterfully found level planes. Now maturity has come, bringing other planes that touch and reconstruct the troubled world in the philosophical axis. But this always comes beautifully for Pashk Pervathi.
Kujtim Buza
Albanian Old Master
Art Critic
