War '40, from the series 'Comments - Happenings', 1985

Vakirtzis showed his works in series of pictures with depictions commenting on a given theme as their common object. One of these series is 'Comments - Happenings', to which his War '40 belongs - a picture which condenses the whole essence of the Albanian epic. The victorious battles, the transporting of supplies to the fighting men, and the return of the soldier to his family and the embrace of his child are crowded on to the surface of the work in an effort by the artist to recall to the memory everything that happened during the course of the war. 'Keeping company' with yesterday, the assimilation of historical material, which from being a document becomes a painting with sensibility and emotion, and functions through the juxtaposing of items from the historical memory and elevation into a living reality, as Vakirtzis, a committed artist, never ceased to comment on wars, conflicts, and disasters. And within this endless action of a heterogeneous crowd, individual figures stand out, alien to one another, in a 'monologue' which gives expression, as the artist himself tells us in his autobiographical writings, to "units and groups, all together and alien".