The first Italian solo show by Alban Hajdinaj brings together a range of works produced between 2003 and 2009. The artist from Tirana has achieved significant success with participation in important international events such as Manifesta 4 and the group show “Eurasia” at MART in Rovereto. The artistic research on show at the Galleria Contemporaneo is essentially concerned with the nature of the image: the use which is made of it in the world of consumer goods and advertising, its interaction with social behaviour and its capacity to provoke transformations. This is the way we should read the series of pastel drawings derived from logos and consumer goods, as a way of paradoxically giving them back the undercurrent of artistic communication which this type of communication seems to quote from (and validate itself with). This is therefore a work which carefully inspects that which is behind the image and the ways of drawing out the latent aspects. An example of this is the very recent work undertaken by the artist on the back of strongly ideological paintings from the collection of the Albanian National Gallery of Arts in Tirana, and now show to the public again. Also the video works in the exhibition seek to examine the same problem. In “Alisa and Sarah” (2006) two girls flick through a magazine full of pictures of American wrestling champions, imperceptibly, through comments and gestures, the tension in their game increases. Hajdinaj’s, work is discreet, but in his work the complexity of the relationship with western culture and habits is subjected to a process of being turned upside down and subtle re-reading: “The origin of left and right” may indeed come from testing the strength of a famous pair of jeans.