PETRA HALKES' REVIEW OF UNTITLED LINE
BorderCrossing, Issue #87, pp.100

Robert Kananaj

Robert Kananaj unwinds an endless line like a thread from a spool. On four sheets of paper measuring four by three feet each, the line unfurls thinly in spaces where it catches the light, while in others it moves incessantly back on itself, gathering darkness. When the line stops, a foot, hands covering a face, the palm of a hand and an ear have appeared. A small cone of thread floats by the side of the ear, perhaps a sign of more drawings to come.

The craftsmanship of these works brings to mind accomplished drawings such as Durer’s Praying Hands and Goltzius’s burned Right Hand. Their hands form a testament to technical skill and invite the viewer to consider the vulnerability and transitory nature of the human body. While Kananaj’s drawings compete with the Old Masters in skill, their size and the meditative method in which they were produced speak of a different intent. Kananaj’s oversized ear and foot reverse the process of recognition and contemplation; the endlessly moving line testifies to a process of contemplation that stops when a monumental image of a strong and functional body part can be recognized.

The source of Kananaj’s line seems closer to the spiritual quest found in Irish monasteries of the seventh and eight centuries. His openwork sculpture of a hand, made of silver wire, that complements the drawings in this exhibition, also points to a Celtic line. Like the heads and legs interwoven in the intricate patterns of the Book of Kells’s carpet pages, one of Kananaj’s drawings shows a palm of the hand overlaid with a grid, from which a body in pieces emerges.

The monks worked their way through a hierarchy of imagery, from the animalistic to pure abstract ornamentation that purported to open a window to the divine. In their dark age of great waves of migration, heaven was a solace to which the suffering could still turn, but no such transcendance is to be found in Kananaj’s work. His spiritual quest is far more rudimentary and existential, connected as it is to the raw political realities of a life in our secular, but similarly unsettled , times.

Born in Albania, Kananaj left Tirana and moved to Toronto five years ago. This bare fact hides the sacrifices and the blind leap into the unknown that such a move entails, but Kananaj’s drawings are a moving record of one man’s struggle to put together a scattered life. Torn from all that is familiar, the artist is thrown back on himself and finds in his body a constant that can be relied upon to create connections to a new and different world.

Robert Kananaj’s exhibition “Untitled Line” was at the offthemapgallery in Toronto, Ontario, from May 3 to June 6, 2003

Petra Halkes is a writer and critic who lives in Ottawa