Agron Hoti is an artist with a strong imagination and Eastern European sensitivity much like the famous Ibrahim Kodra both born in the Albanian hills and immersed into the vast world of contemporary fine art. While the former is now in history books Agron Hoti, born in 1970, competes with his undoubted talent and the numerous awards that have been attributed to him.
In his native country of Albania, in Mamurras, province of Kurbin, he became interested in sculpture and revealed the young precocious talent for drawing, creating stunning portraits. When choosing high schools he participated in the competition to enter the High School of Art but upon enrollment he could not find his name on the roster, it had been deleted from the system by the then communist regime. It was the early eighties of the last century and young Agron does not abandon his artistic passion, in fact he began to create sculptures with wood he finds in his father’s carpentry shop and exhibited in the annual exhibition held in the prefecture of Kruja, finding an unexpected success. During his two years of military service, the main activity of Agron Hoti is painting, painting written declarations of the regime on public walls and portraits of the dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania continuously since the end of World War II until his death in 1985. The dictatorship fell in 1990 and the building of democracy is not immediate, when Agron returns to Mamurras he is back in the chaos and like many Albanians emigrates to Greece, where he lives working as an iconographer and restorer of churches in Athens.
After ten years of residence in the Greek capital he decided to move to Verona, Italy, to join his wife who is also Albanian. In Verona he begins a new life building frames for artists then engages himself in acrylic painting.
From his first “inventions” rhythm, color, light and stamp assume the role of carriers and remain a constant throughout his basic research. Agron Hoti’s abstract painting is immediately characterized by his incisive mark and the confident brushstroke of someone who is sure to know the representation, preferring chromaticism always mitigated by formal balance. The technique of collage, deepened by the artist since 2008, develops an iconography parallel to the abstract figuration and Hoti experiences with the three-dimensionality of the frames that capture details of urban architecture in the Veneto region, or else he explores the internal mechanism of watches.
Important is the participation in September 2009 at the Pitti Immagine, as guest of Stand of Monsieur magazine headed by Franz Bottré, subsequently he exhibited in major galleries in Monaco for four continuous years. Agron Hoti is attracted by the structure, fascinated by the complexity of the forms unraveled on the canvas, stretching the colors in the disruption of ever-new textures; the artist transcends the actual representation with the impetus of gesture interpretation and repertoire with new surfaces or personal photos or those of French Gabrielle Boisell. Finally, he elevates the aggression of the engine with the crushing of cars and their accessories, the paintings with this subject are on permanent display at the Motor Show Pagani Zonda Modena.
The discovery of color dissolved by any semantic relationship is Agron Hoti’s stylistic mark and together with the mark he assumes the sole function of the stamp, iterated in different semantic fields of his intensive work, such as collages on comics from Spider-Man to the Hulk to Superman, which are on display at the Libreria e Casa D’aste Little Nemo in Turin, Italy.
The research for Agron Hoti is art for art’s sake, it’s genuine expression released from the isms, his gesture communicates in constant consonance with its refined chromaticism and produces harmonic relationships of endless resonances.
DISCOVERING ALBANIA 