Reviews

Harmony of Colors with a Conductive Expressivness

“Koha Ditore”, 23 February 2002

expert of the opening speech to Eshref Qahili’s personal exhibition at the National Art Gallery of Kosovo

“This spiritual and meditative stir of the author has a name, an essence, and a resonance. It has harmony and contrast. It has an eruptive force, expressiveness, and a rational balance. After all, art is nothing else but a harmony of contradictions of both conscience and sub-conscience. Qahili is precisely on his way of capturing that harmony and keeping in his hand the key of pictorial vocation, of art and creativeness.”

Mehmet Kraja

Academic, Writer and Director of the Academy of Science and Arts of the Republic of Kosovo

Foreword

expert from the catalogue of the personal exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007

“… and I saw the sky in a basement in Prishtina, I saw clouds and a framed blue sky, I saw towers above the clouds, I saw a tree growing backwards in the field of skies, I saw the last bison which had left the earth for good and where they inhabited the sky, I saw a celestial orchestra. I heard a harmonica stretching beyond the horizon like the sky breathing deeply. I heard a violin whose sounds are drifted in distance like clouds are being blown away by the wind. Right here in Eshref Qahil’s studio, like in an underground shelter of childhood where precious things are stored as memories solely for us I found the lost comfort again, despite the time…”

Emil Aleksiev

Former director of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, 2007

Painting That Unites Dimensions of Time

expert from the article “Koha Ditore” April 24, 2004

“…Eshref Qahili, through the brush and the colour, confronts times, themes and ideas, while sublimating them into an original pictorial model that builds the metaphysical artistic figuration. The past, the present and the future in Qahili’s painting seem to stick together, aid and assemble as three different dimensions of human experience…”

Kadri Metaj

philosopher

Calmness, Movement and Hidden Figure

expert from “SARAJEVSKE SVESKE BR. 45-46”, 2015

“…The relationship between the plane and movement in Eshref Qahili’s works has a highly dynamic nature. Despite the stagnant and calm character of the traces of brush spread on the surface, the lines, on the other hand, are extremely careless and anxious. The leaps of lines that move from intermixed forms to the space inform us of the existence of an inter-state between movement and calmness…”

Umit Inatci

Artist, Art Historian and Writer

A Panel that Highlights (Distinguishes) the Dilemmas of the Albanian Woman

expert from the article, “Bota Sot”, June 19, 2002

“…All this background, which has golden cuts, because for him the figure interferes, helps to emerge the biographical centre of the painter’s artistic concern, helps to read his pictorial phenomenon, helps the specialist to know the structure of the colours used and the own technical use on them. Exactly this background would call Eshref Qahili – the Painter of the blue paintings…”

Suzana Varvarica

Art historian and curator

He Who Thinks and Wants to Be

expert from the article, “Exclusive” Nr. 24 – May  2002

“…We understand it as a fertile imagination. As a shadow theatre, in his paintings, there is something more than filling surfaces with colours and stripes. The blue colour reveals itself several times… The blue that stands out and the blue that we left halfway through, have a history. Something new can happen on the old roads!… Qahili reveals his good knowledge of space and figurative freedom with the taste of a magical realization…”

Rexhep Ferri

Academic, Artist, painter, professor