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Rovers Malaj: the art of holding the image

Rovers Malaj: the art of holding the image

In the painting of Rovers Malaj – Albanian painter, born in 1995 – visual language opens onto a zone of uncertainty, where nothing is fully stated, yet everything is implied. The images seem to surface from an undefined distance, as if they had been held back too long before emerging. In his solo exhibition at NAMI Gallery in Naples, curated by Massimiliano Maglione, the artist builds a mental landscape where each work is an act of listening rather than display. The canvas is not a surface to be occupied, but a space to be cautiously inhabited, a space where painting does not represent, but withholds, as if trying to recall something always on the verge of being lost.

Rovers Manaj, “Velluto rosa”, installation view, NAMI Gallery, 2025, courtesy di galleria e d’artista, ph. Massimiliano Maglione

Rovers Malaj, “Velluto rosa”, installation view, NAMI Gallery, 2025, courtesy di galleria e d’artista

Malaj does not paint to reveal, but to suggest. His is a painting of the margin, the interval, the image in a state of continuous becoming and undoing. His subjects – fragments of daily life, human figures, natural elements – seem to have emerged from an interrupted dream. They are not protagonists, but passersby. Rather than narrating, they simply exist, suspended between presence and disappearance. And in doing so, they compel us to linger. Color plays a decisive role in this suspension. The recurring pink that washes across many of his works is not merely a chromatic choice, but a position. It doesn’t soften, it filters; it doesn’t accentuate, it disorients. It acts like a skin that coats the painting and alters its temperature, making it ambiguous, muted, elusive. In this emotional thinning, each image feels barely rescued from an imminent forgetting, as though the painting is fighting to hold together what time and memory are already dissolving.

Rovers Manaj, “Velluto rosa”, installation view, NAMI Gallery, 2025, courtesy di galleria e d’artista, ph. Massimiliano Maglione

Rovers Malaj, “Velluto rosa”, installation view, NAMI Gallery, 2025, courtesy di galleria e d’artista

In Malaj’s work, the relationship between image and title is always disorienting. There is irony, yes, but never for its own sake. The titles serve as instruments of slippage, breaking any univocal reading. And so the work opens up, slipping away from categorization. It is precisely in this calibrated lightness, not superficial, but attentive to silence, that painting regains a possibility of existing today: not as narration, but as perceptual and affective experience.

Rovers Manaj, “Velluto rosa”, installation view, NAMI Gallery, 2025, courtesy di galleria e d’artista, ph. Massimiliano Maglione

Rovers Malaj, “Velluto rosa”, installation view, NAMI Gallery, 2025, courtesy di galleria e d’artista

The exhibition, entitled Velluto rosa (Pink Velvet), is constructed as a field of subtle tensions. There are no spectacular visual solutions, no overt theoretical statements. Instead, there is a mental geography of pauses, nuances and gaps. The work is never conclusive, but always in waiting. As if, for the artist, painting itself means asking questions more than making declarations. With each canvas, Rovers Malaj invites us to slow down. To rethink our way of seeing, our habit of demanding explanations from images. His painting offers nothing to decode, but everything to feel. And today, perhaps, that’s exactly what we need.

Info:

Rovers Manaj. Velluto rosa
curated by Massimiliano Maglione
22/05 – 19/06/2025
NAMI Gallery
Via Carlo Poerio 9, Napoli
www.namigallery.com


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