ALBANIAN PAVILION

Artist: Eduard Baçe

THE REFUGEE

Looking at Baçe the man one cannot help but be delighted by his almost 18 th century charm and good manners. This is not a ploy, as evidenced by his Kosovar refugee portraits. These sprang from the ghastly stories he turned into Dutch as interpreter in 1999. No, not so much a ploy as control; keeping the lid on the pressure cooker until there is nowhere to run.

This series is arguably the best and most representative of his work to have been shown in this country. The monotype could not beless complex. Even so, the stronglines and specks spell emotion of the deepest hue - and a sense of war to match. There is a harking back to a tougher attitude of centuries ago. A different mode of sadness, expressed here via accelerated evolution. Black and white predominates in the drawings. Their message coll ides with a taken-for-granted contemporary scene. Politely (in itself a contrast with our time-frame) but firmly, they bump up against commonplace, nagging issues. Death and life … now just how far off are they?

The presentation confirms the artist's adaptation of conceptual and contemporary art forms. But as Baçe would be the first to insist, it melds with a contemporary art and art community that has embedded itself here over the past several years; art rooted in a country with an extraordinary history, where signs and stealth can capture westerners before they realise what is happening. Art from Albania .

Eduart Baçe (1967, Gjirokastr , Albania ), trained as a scu l ptor at the Tirana Academy of Arts under the old totalitarian regime.

Chaos following the fall of the Stalinist state forced Eduart to leave his home land. He settled in the Netherlands in 1994 and was now able to experiment with a diversity of materials, forms and colours. His traditional way of working developed into a more conceptual and contemporary art form. Eduart Baçe's work has been shown in Greece , Belgium and the Netherlands - as well as the country of his birth, Albania .

Anthony Fudge

Critic en poet