Blerta Hashani’s first solo show, “Ambient,” dissects the idyllic rural landscape and reworks it in twenty-seven small-scale paintings. Each composition reduces nature to basic forms and lines, with distilled landscapes comprised of muted tones of brown and blue. Kodër dhe diell (Hill and Sun) (all works cited 2020) incorporates a scrap of a handwritten letter in the shape of a hill. Over the mound, a black sun—an eclipse, perhaps?—hangs in a vast whiteness broken only by a burst of vertical black ink lines at the center-left, allusions to dry twigs, some of nature’s less photogenic features. While united in composition, the individual treatment of each of the elements encourages viewers to read them independently of one another. Similarly, in Bari, kodër, kërmille (Grass, Hill, Snail), the landscape is broken down into three disconnected components, disrupting the traditional understanding of nature as a stable and unified whole.

Hashani’s interest in surface is reflected in her use of the environmentally friendly brown jute sack. An everyday object in rural contexts, the fabric here provides a background to frame all of the artist’s compositions. Within her images, Hashani frequently includes torn pieces of paper bearing samples of automatic writing. The ink markings on the brown scraps never convey a concrete meaning, but the fragments generate a rich visual texture while also gesturing toward the artist. Rroba (Clothes) centers on an uneventful tableau: a blouse-shaped cut-out branded with an indecipherable scrawl and two simple navy blue lines that stand for a pair of pants. Charged with familiarity and intimacy, the outfit floats in the nonplace of another white void, imbuing the scene with absence even as the work’s title affirms a presence.

— Erëmirë Krasniqi