PARIS.- The exhibition “We built a fantastic palace at night…” presented at the Institut Giacometti, places the works of contemporary artist Petrit Halilaj and those of Alberto Giacometti side by side in dialogue.


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Marked since childhood by the war in his native Kosovo, Petrit Halilaj developed a practice in which individual and collective stories meet. Gradually, drawing, and in particular children’s drawing, has become a language of choice for him, a language to keep alive. In 2015, he found his way into it again by creating a new graphic lexicon in which he transforms children’s drawings into drawings in space. He calls them “Abetare”, a word taken from a manual for teaching the alphabet to Albanian speaking children, widely used in Kosovo.

In 1932, Giacometti copied a children’s drawing seen on the pavement in his neighbourhood, on avenue Villemain in the 14th arrondissement, in Paris. From that drawing, Halilaj imagines a dialogue and shows the presence of the theme of childhood in his elder’s oeuvre through some thirty works especially created for the exhibition.

Relating to a text by Giacometti on his work The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932), the exhibition and its title explore the dynamics of the fantastic and fragile constructions of the works of both artists. In an original installation devised by Halilaj, the exhibition weaves a subtle network of connections between Giacometti’s works. Halilaj’s drawing extends and combines children’s drawing and Giacometti’s to offer them to the visitors. From one hand to another, the drawing is a vector of dialogue between people and their imaginaries that the artist develops in shapes rather than in words. It works at opening up the imagination without imposing any meaning on it.

SILVIO & LUNA

« What didn’t change from my childhood until now is that when you talk about drawing, you talk about imagination,» Halilaj emphasises. Since childhood, the artist has been keeping an intense relationship with drawing, and his art vocation was hastened by the conflict in Kosovo (1998-1999) that tore apart populations and uprooted the young Halilaj from his home village to a refugee camp. Encouraged by the Italian psychologist Giacomo “Angelo” Poli, in the refugee camp of Kukës, in Albania, he attracted people’s attention with his passion for drawing and his skill at drawing with both hands. He found in the medium of drawing the means to process and overcome the traumas of the war.

In Geneva, where he was holed up in 1941 because of the war, Giacometti spent time with his mother and nephew Silvio, of whom he made many portraits, sculpted and drawn. In a few sketchbooks he indulged in an original exercise: he invited the child to draw on the sheets on which his silhouette was sketched. On several sketchbooks, a dialogue developed between the child and his uncle, in a series of delicate drawings made by four hands. Halilaj carries on that graphic dialogue with his niece Luna.

IN THE PALACE

The Palace, a monumental drawing in space, is displayed in the main room of the Institut Giacometti. Like a dream, it associates unrelated moments and ideas, creating a connection between several works by Giacometti, Couple (1926), Mother and daughter (1933), Apollo (1929) and a man in the children’s drawing copied by the artist in 1932.

“I can only talk indirectly of my sculptures, and hope to partially say what inspired me to make them,” Giacometti wrote in 1933, commenting on his work The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932), and he continued: “We built a fantastic palace at night […], a very fragile palace made of matches: one wrong move and part of the tiny construction collapsed; we started it all over again and again.”

Halilaj identified with that precarious form: “[it] is a thread between all the houses I lived in, and that my family and I lost and were displaced from and tried to rebuild during my life – our house in Runik [Kosovo] after the war, and then in 2010 the family house in Prishtina. For this exhibition, the title came first, this idea of constructing a dream palace to live in."

SEEING LIKE A CHILD

Petrit Halilaj shares with Alberto Giacometti a fondness for the way children look at adults.

As a child, Halilaj benefitted from the unconditional support of his mother in his budding art career, as was the case with Giacometti with both his parents. The figure of the father is important for both artists, but in a different way, between reverence and defiance. Abetare (Giacometti’s Cock) (2025), presents a mocking character that looks up and down a portrait of Giovanni Giacometti, the artist’s father. Abetare (Giacometti’s Love Seat) (2025) is taken from a piece of paper with a drawing in which Giacometti covers his father’s portrait with imaginary sculptures.

In their respective work, both artists keep up a dialogue between drawing and sculpture.

In Giacometti’s, some sculptures like Portrait of the father (1927-30) or Walking figure (1927) offer, as in Halilaj’s, a hybrid form between drawing and sculpture.

ESSENTIAL BEING

Discovering the metallic structures that would eventually generate Giacometti’s post war sculptures in the storerooms of the Fondation Giacometti, Halilaj was struck by their likeness to his own sculptures as much as with his lexicon of forms. That’s the case with his “Abetare” and his spindly sculptures like Here to Remind You (Struthio Camelus) (2024). Halilaj speaks about Giacometti’s metallic frames in these terms: “talking about the essence of sculpture and going to the limit of it. Selecting the armature stick sculptures was very important for me. It reveals something in the moment before a sculpture becomes a sculpture. I strongly related to how I see his language and mine in just these two lines that are the essence of so many subjects: these black monochrome lines that become a drawing in a space. I am very interested in the idea that as a sculpture it doesn’t take up volume.”

Like Giacometti’s main structures on which matter is added, Halilaj’s works like Can we do something together, just this and free forever (White) (2011) make use of light shapes like twigs and feathers, suggesting a lightness in the sculpture that can go as far as emptiness or the evocation of a near disappearance.

Halilaj comments on it: “this resonates with me in his variation of scale and forms, sometimes being realistic, sometimes becoming abstract, on the verge of disappearing.”

SMALL AND LARGE

In Halilaj’s work, many pieces make use of children’s drawing enlarged to almost gigantic proportions. In Giacometti’s, the scale of works is an essential feature. In his work, he favoured the small format, so much so that between 1958 and 1961, he ran into difficulties when he had to make sculptures in huge dimensions for the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York. As he explained concerning the projects of monuments to the heroes of the Resistance (Rol Tanguy, Gabriel Péri), Giacometti conveyed the greatness of men in a form of humility and in modest, if not very modest, formats. For him, as for Halilaj, all the intensity of human existence can be expressed within the scale of small works.

1. Alberto Giacometti, interview with Jean Clay [1963], Écrits. Articles, notes et entretiens, Paris, Hermann/Fondation Giacometti, 2008, p. 315. Jean Clay, “Alberto Giacometti. Le long dialogue avec la mort d’un très grand sculpteur de notre temps”, Réalités, n° 215, December 1963, p. 135-144



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