Painter Mikel Temo opens the exhibition with paintings "Faces of an uncertain time", a dialogue with himself about the uncertainty of the time we live in

These three self-portraits are the center of the exhibition and there is nothing better than taking yourself as an example to give a certain idea about the uncertainty of the times today. Borrowing someone else's face is not so pleasant, while your own face can become the symbol of what you mean. This is the reason why I took the self-portrait as a starting point to say something", says painter Mikel Temo, art teacher. The exhibition was opened to the public in "Gallery 70" in the "Toptani" center and includes 6 paintings, but also a sculpture is part of it. The painter says that since 2018, when he opened his last personal exhibition, he has participated in other exhibitions in groups of artists. "The works have been done over the years, starting from 2019 until this year. Since 2018 that I have not exhibited, I have been working, some of them have been exhibited in collective exhibitions. This personal exhibition follows the one that opened in 2018 and will remain until June 17," says painter Mikel Temo.

The cycle of self-portraits

 The researcher Luan Topçiu in a material about the exhibition states that the cycle of self-portraits offered by the painter Mikel Temo in the "Faces of Uncertain Times" exhibition is part of that world art movement that aimed to revolutionize the contemporary portrait, avoiding any prejudice and puritanism of fake. (Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, etc.). "The portraits of Mikel Temos are part of that division of the reformation of aesthetics. The cycle of silent works shocks you at first sight, but if we overcome the first instinctive psychological shock caused by the first contact with them, we will discover the deep art. Through his disarming honesty we will soon realize that the beauty of a painting does not necessarily coincide with its pleasant side. ?We are dealing with an art that deliberately changes the appearance of things, not ironically, not even for sarcasm, but based on a completely different feeling - admiration, love, anxiety, nightmare, fear, panic. It is a simple truth that feelings affect the way we see things, the world, and people. The works aim to express the transformation of all our feelings under the influence of an unexpected emotion", says the researcher, among other things. According to him, unlike Edvard Münch (1863-1944), one of the icons of modern art, who, in his masterpiece "The Scream", does not paint the man, but the scream, in a reduction of the details of the person who emits it, Mikel Temo does not give up anatomy and details, plastic and materialized form. "His scream is an impossibility of articulation, more than the voice of the piscama, we felt its deafness, the impossibility of hearing it, the drama of its lack of expression. A cry remains in the attempt. The paintings prove strength. The being reaches the peak of accumulation and must burst, like an overflowing vessel under pressure. Temo entrusts all this to the portrait of the bewildered in suffering, through striking anatomical and psychological elements. The self-portraits of Mikel Temos were realized in one of the most unusual periods, that of the pandemic, of the crisis experienced by all of humanity. They can be read as a hint, as a metaphor to get out of isolation, from the nightmare of loneliness, from the crisis, from all the crises that the modern man gets", says researcher Topçiu. Mikel Temo graduated in Monumental Painting and Drawing at the Academy of Arts in Tirana, Albania in 1986, after training in an intensive program in traditional art he completed a Doctorate in Arts in 1997. After exploratory trips to art museums in Italy and France his work became more abstract with traces of reality. The works of the visual artist Mikel Temo are part of the permanent fund of the National Art Gallery of Albania.