The recent visit of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to Albania, which highlighted the sea with the beautiful beaches of Albania as well as their hospitality, brought attention to the figure of Edi Rama, Prime Minister of the country since 2013, writes the Italian newspaper “Libero “, written by journalist Luca Beatrice.

We can say that Edi Rama can not only boast of a first-rate political career, but even more. Rama was Minister of Culture, Sports and Youth in 1998-2000, Mayor of Tirana for three terms, Secretary of the Socialist Party and therefore Prime Minister.

Italians will certainly remember him in the early days of Covid, when in a video he talked about friendship and helping Italians struggling with the pandemic.

Not everyone knows, on the other hand, that Edi Rama is an internationally quoted artist. Despite his institutional commitments, he finds the way and the time not to abandon painting, drawing and exhibition installation projects to which he is often invited.

His multidimensional curriculum is truly important: he participated in three Venice Biennales, in 1999, 2003 and, especially important, in 2017 with a personal space in the exhibition curated by director Christine Macel.

Several prestigious galleries represent him: Carlierfgebauer in Berlin, Marian Goodman in New York and Alfonso Artiaco in Naples with whom he has created the most intense human and professional relationships.

As a boy, Edi Rama was a professional basketball player and played for his country’s national team. Before the fall of the communist regime he worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana, then in 1994 he emigrated to France together with his friend Anri Sala who would become one of the most important artists of the European scene who is even today, writes Luca Beatrice.

Precisely in that period, from a nation to be totally rebuilt, a microgeneration of really important authors emerged, some like Sisley Xhafa and Adrian Paci trained in Italy at the Brera Academy, others, while Sala and Rama chose Paris.

Upon returning to his homeland, Rama chooses the path of politics while simultaneously developing his artistic practice, especially in abstract-drawing with colors wrapped in lumps of color and in multi-material sculpture.

While he is sitting in conferences or meetings, he makes countless sketches on the pages of his agenda, in office notes, protocols, faxes and documents, but nothing is further from improvisation, there is always a project … an idea that develops these compositions as part of the human body.

In sculpture, he works in the studio on weekends, when he has no institutional commitments. In the last exhibition in Italy, in January 2020 at the Artiaco space in the historic center of Naples, Rama presented the union of the two spirits of his work, achieving moments of rare intensity.

The world is full of people capable of achieving excellent results not only in their main profession, but also in areas that we can consider as hobbies. Making it to the Venice Biennale as Prime Minister is a rarity indeed.

Among the Italian politicians of the past, Amintore Fanfani, several times prime minister and president of the DC who adored abstract painting, even received the applause of a harsh critic like Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, while the socialist, trade unionist, president of the Abruzzo region Ottaviano Del Turco was more devoted to figurative painting.

Neither of them crossed the threshold of the amateur, unlike Edi Rama, whose works are listed in the international market with tens of thousands of euros.

“Being mayor of Tirana is the highest form of conceptual art. Is pure art, Rama declared a few years ago.

This could certainly be the driving force that led him to take up the urban planning of the city in the neighborhood where the private houses were degraded. Rama, like a true painter, had repainted the gray facades with bright colors and lively patterns.

The result was surprising: the residents enthusiastically welcomed the transformation and soon the “colored city” became a real tourist attraction.

The harmonization of colors found by Rama and the revitalization of Tirana starts from that period.