Stranger to the reason Ornela Vorpsi

Ornela Vorpsi presents her first solo exhibition stranger to the reason, curated by Elena Sorokina, at Ruttkowski;68 in Paris. Folly has had many names throughout human history—insanity, craziness, lunacy, hysteria, or mental disorder. This language has been as abundant as it was imprecise, until psychiatry began classifying certain mental states into the categories of madness we recognize today.

For Vorpsi, naming has always been as important as painting originally trained as a painter in Albania in the 1990s, she later turned to writing and has since become an acclaimed author, publishing numerous works of fiction. her striking prose, which constantly examines the boundaries of linguistic and mental foreignness, has earned her several prestigious literary awards.

The artist’s ongoing reflection on the porosity and liminality of mental states continues in her visual work, where she ceaselessly experiments with pictorial language, compositional complexities, and the performative dimension of painting. bright red lipstick and blush, applied to the diaphanous, spectral bodies of her figures, not only embrace a performative dimension but also generate a vehement, almost violent expression that defies attribution to any concrete source. Her exploration extends beyond body politics or modes of selfexpression, instead seeking to understand the extreme fluidity of mental states and the flip side of normativity.

Opening reception        12/04/2025         5-8PM

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