Brilant Milazimi casts creatures with endless legs and arms for his paintings. They have heads as round as bowling balls, are as transparent as X-ray images and live in an unreal universe bubble with floating garlands of baby teeth. Are they children, teenagers or adults? Their appearance: ageless. It’s creepy. If you are looking for role models, E.T., the alien who wants to phone home, seems an obvious choice. Alien - exactly! But the creatures also have human traits: grinning, they intertwine their bodies to dance and socialize in groups. The picture titles reveal their desires, thoughts and aspirations: Let's See is one, another Should I Tell You Something, or Everything Starts at Home.

Untitled (figure 01), shows a young man in a bright white cell. Milazimi likes to use a strong magenta for his figures, as is the case here. The young man is sitting on a wooden chair, stark naked and smoking. A mirror leans against the wall. He is joined by an enigmatic animal with pointed ears, a pointed beak and two thin legs. Neither a dog nor a rat. What are we looking at here? A situation from the life of the artist in Pristina? A glimpse into Kosovo's past? Clues to its present?

Nothing is clear at first glance; nothing is revealed or unambiguous in Milazimi's pictures. Truth, dream, trauma, memory - screen memories, perhaps, that conceal the actual core of the picture? Personal, maybe even collective fears of Kafkaesque transformations? Is the smoker a prisoner or Narcissus, the young man who falls in love with his reflection? Perhaps he is also a character from the legendary TV series The X-Files, which combines science fiction, fantasy and horror elements. In the series, the Cigarette Smoking Man, aka the Cancer Man, is a villain who is responsible for the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King and is working on a vaccine against extraterrestrial viruses. He is also a chain smoker.

Brilant Milazimi's work tempts us to follow his script into the absurd, the weird, the ludicrous. But perhaps we shouldn't overdo it, and it's simply “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”?

Text: Brigitte Huck; Translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh