Ilir Zefi. Jazz painting

curated by Marco Di Capua

Galleria Russo opens a new location in Milan on via dell’Orso (Brera area) a new space dedicated to contemporary art focusing, as per tradition, on the new language painting. The gallery opens with the exhibition Ilir Zefi Jazz painting, a solo show by Albanian painter Ilir Zefi with about thirty large and medium-sized works, made from 2000 to the present. The title chosen by curator Marco Di Capua is an indication to understand the artist’s inspiration, from action painting to jazz painting, the works on display, and Zefi’s artistic life. And as the curator “The action of a 2000-brand abstract painter is as stylistically romantic as the solo poignant Charlie Parker in Lover Man or as meditative as John Coltrane in My Favorite Things. Jazz composers beloved by Zephyrs, who injects his passion for this music into the arteries of the painting and then listens to its rhythm, its accelerated pulsations. Jazz painting consolidates that sort of shuddering organic unity that exists between the painter’s body in action and space and time.” Zefi’s works are spontaneous, surprising, moving and deconstructed, dominated by an organized created with strong and bright hues. When the artist paints, often accompanied by music and – at some performances – a live band, the result is an explosive mixture of gestures and colors.