Roland Garuli grew up in a family steeped in artistic tradition and sensitivity, which greatly influenced the direction his life would take. As a child, his considerable artistic talent became apparent. He easily transformed blank drawing papers into something quite expressive and colorful under the guidance and tutelage of his father, Stefanos, an accomplished Canadian-born artist. He eagerly delved into a universe of dynamic colors, vibrant shapes, and energetic compositions. Published at the age of 7, his first design appeared in a prestigious Austrian art magazine.

 Over succeeding years, the young artist became comfortable in artistic techniques in mediums of pencil, charcoal, oil, watercolor, pastel, tempera, and graphic on linoleum. Between the ages of 9 and 13, his drawings and illustrations were published in local and international magazines. His earliest works were generally realistic and strongly influenced by the Impressionists and Cubists. He studied at the Tirana School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1980.

In 1991 Roland held his first personal exhibition in the National Gallery of Fine Arts, Albania. He adventurously indulged in the medium of monotype. His images were light, subtle, and airy. Yet, the spontaneity of the impression process demanded gesture, expressiveness, directness, lushness, and sensuality in working with living paint and color. Other art exhibitions will follow Roland’s artistic career in Italy and present in Montreal-Canada. 

Today’s, particular motifs give Roland the breadth to let his passionate and unconfined colors incessantly wrestle with shapes and explicit contours. He boldly thrusts a continuous movement of elements back and forth, up and down, close and far, avoiding a rigid perspective. He is drawn into his paintings as if into an art vortex, and the stimulus is ecstatic rather than static, combining lines and planes to suggest both the recognizable object and its movement through space. His line is harsh and arrow-like and his palette is dark in color with blacks and grays. His landscapes are quite emotional, suffused with a sincerity that is quite moving. His portraits range in mood from bright lyricism to mysterious sadness. Still-life arrangements are light, subtle, and airy.

By and large, Roland’s originality lies in developing an interesting technique of exploring binary oppositions within-subjects and methods respectively: by leaving them intact and irreconcilable, He finds an ideal synthesis between the expressive and the representative; also, he thus offers an instructive way, perhaps eventually, to capture transient effects and his own passing emotional states.

 A. Szadkowska