Entela Konomi is an artist and lawyer of Albanian and Greek origin. Based in Montreal, she now manages the Art Gallery AMBIGU, located in downtown Montreal. Inside the AMBIGU Art Gallery complex is also Konomi’s studio and exhibition space, where art lovers can discover and appreciate her colourful and vibrant artworks, along the artistic outputs of other local and international artists.
Entela Konomi has had a prosperous career as a lawyer and senior officer in the management of Security and Civil Protection in Albania. During her career in law, she took important art classes from well-known painters in Albania, Greece and Canada. If legal certainty is at the very heart of the rule of law, venturing into the realm of art is like to exile to the other end of clarity. The union of these opposites makes Konomi the artist who left behind the certainness to sail ardently in the universe of the ambiguous. The lawyer being an artist sounds like a paradox. A lawyer seeks predictability, certainty,
logical analysis and clarity of thought and words. The artist looks for feeling, soul, grace, style and line.
H.W. Janson, the well-known art critic, draws a very useful distinction, in his introduction to History of Art, between the work of an artist and that of a craftsperson. The artist displays talent; the craftsperson shows only aptitude. The artist is unpredictable; the craftsperson is measurable, constant and specific. “Originality distinguishes art from craft.” That same comparison can be useful to distinguish the artist from the lawyer. The artist translates feeling, emotion and perception into a medium others can perceive, a process very different from the lawyer’s job of fact analysis, pattern comparison and prediction. The artist and the lawyer work at different ends of the thought spectrum, and their training reflects these essential differences. Visual artists are trained in a systematic fashion to interpret what they see through forms, lines, shades and colors. Artists see life with their senses and emotions.
Konomi the lawyer perceives reality, interprets it and then uses all available tools, traditional or newly invented, to achieve her goals. As an artist, Konomi sees the infinite possibilities of creative law, drawing feelings from the emotional and creative side of life.
The artist, she can rethink without boundaries, the sky being the only limit.