The White Whale

Presented at Bremond Capela, The White Whale marks a turn towards intimacy, silence, and the fragile stillness of a moment, the exhibition inaugurates a new chapter in Valdrin Thaqi’s practice. This shift comes after his exhibition The House Above the Hill, held in 2025 at the National Gallery of Kosovo (Galeria Kombëtare e Kosovës) in Pristina, where Thaqi explored the concept of home and the body as a site of origin.

Each painting revolves around a single figure. One body, one face, one action. The model, whether an acquaintance or a stand-in figure for the artist himself, performs a minimal gesture: crossing their arms, covering their mouth, spitting, or eating paper. These simple yet charged actions become, in Thaqi’s hands, the stage of unease. The narrative remains withheld, hovering somewhere between what we perceive and what escapes. We are left in a state of suspension, sensing that something has just happened, or is about to happen.

Although these works often stem from personal and autobiographical impulses, they are not confessional. Rather, they record inner states, tension, doubt, fragility, moments of emotion caught at their most acute.

The artist photographs his models in his studio, against a drywall surface he built himself, a working wall that serves both as a backdrop and an easel. A space where the living moment meets its still image, where time pauses just long enough to become paint. There is no décor, no ornamental staging, only light, gesture, and the tension of the body. This restraint heightens the introspective dimension of his work: each canvas functions like a still frame, paused at the precise instant when meaning slips away. Thaqi often describes his paintings as cut moments, images torn from the flow of reality.

In The White Whale, each canvas acts as a mirror. Behind the model’s silence, we project our own stories and emotions. Thaqi does not tell stories; he creates situations. And perhaps that is the quiet strength of his work, this ability to turn an ordinary gesture into a suspended moment, at once tangible and immaterial, where painting captures something real just before it dissolves.

Valdrin Thaqi embraces slowness and solitude as vital conditions for painting. His process, both intuitive and exacting, depends on waiting for that elusive, delicate instant when the painting stops being an image and becomes a presence.