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Lot Essay
Of his myriad of inspiration, multimedia contemporary Lebanese New York based artist Nabil Nahas draws his stimulus mainly from nature and the abstract motifs of early Middle Eastern geometry. Born in 1949 in Beirut, Nahas spent the first ten years of his life in Cairo, and then between Cairo and Beirut before moving to the United States in 1968 to complete his higher education at the Louisiana State University and later at Yale University.
Considered as one of Lebanon’s most significant interactive artists, Nahas has held several solo shows in prominent New York galleries as well as in Beirut and Doha. He also participated to numerous group shows including participation at the Venice and Sao Paolo Biennials. His work appears in prestigious public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and the Flint Institute of Art, Michigan; his pieces are also a part of many private collections in the Middle East.
‘I would not call myself a purist, more of an aesthete’, the artist claimed. Never having had a defined style, Nahas constantly rediscovers and challenges himself, by continuously applying different techniques to his work such as pointillism, abstraction, and impressionism. Attempting to find an intermediate between nature and imagination, he combines these different styles to achieve his desired outcome. Experimenting in the micro/macro phenomena, the style of this work is demarcated by an exploration of repetitive geometric forms through colour, contrast and abstraction. Circles, hypnotic spirals, and starfish jut from the canvas in luminous, explosive, colourful compositions. Adding powdered pumice to acrylic paint creates Nahas’s three-dimensional textures. He produces these psychedelic compositions using a style he developed where heavily encrusted, brightly coloured organic shapes rigorously repeat themselves to infinity, bringing to mind the principles of Fractal Geometry as well as the multiplication of single patterns one finds in Islamic art. His universe, where order reigns over chaos, seems to be caught between microcosm and macrocosm; it is playful and vibrant yet simultaneously, subliminal questions can be raised.
His most prominent works are those of the Fractal series of which the present work entitled Sedona is part. It is a rendering of a range of red sandstones in Arizona. He began this series in the mid-1990s, and has been revisiting it since then. In these compositions, Nahas explores the realms of science and nature applying them to the canvas using various techniques to emulate biological growth and the patterns of nature. His work, known for being highly decorative and textured, investigates material culture and how one is able to achieve an adroit aura using impasto mixed with layers upon layers of materials to create this intense reminiscence of the coral in the sea. By combining a distinct artistic perspective with unique technical indexes, Nahas is able to explore the essence of different contemporary styles.
The term fractal refers to the theory of fractal geometry, formulated in the mid-1970s by Benoît Mandelbrot (1924-2010). Mandelbrot described random events in nature deviating from the ideal Euclidean geometry, the rough and fragmented geometric shapes which can be split into parts, each of which is at least approximately a reduced size copy of the whole. According to Mandelbrot, things typically considered to be 'rough', a 'mess' or 'chaotic', like clouds or shorelines, actually had a degree of order. Nahas saw the parallels with his own work as his Fractals paintings also represent a kind of asymmetrical equilibrium. As a result, this relationship between order and disorder continues to be a recurrent theme in the artist's work across all the different bodies of work.
These pieces differ substantially in size and colour, each inducing a different mood. The smallest are like windows into an underwater world of coral reefs while the larger works, breath-taking in their intricacy, simply subsume the observer. On the one hand they look like enveloped surfaces of behemoths and on the other they resemble abnormalities that are visible only on a microscopic scale–the false colour images of a scanning electron microscope. The subtle variations in tone and colour that ripple across the mottled surfaces of these Fractals is both like the speckled light of tropical seas and like the mineral deposits in a slice of marble.
Considered as one of Lebanon’s most significant interactive artists, Nahas has held several solo shows in prominent New York galleries as well as in Beirut and Doha. He also participated to numerous group shows including participation at the Venice and Sao Paolo Biennials. His work appears in prestigious public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and the Flint Institute of Art, Michigan; his pieces are also a part of many private collections in the Middle East.
‘I would not call myself a purist, more of an aesthete’, the artist claimed. Never having had a defined style, Nahas constantly rediscovers and challenges himself, by continuously applying different techniques to his work such as pointillism, abstraction, and impressionism. Attempting to find an intermediate between nature and imagination, he combines these different styles to achieve his desired outcome. Experimenting in the micro/macro phenomena, the style of this work is demarcated by an exploration of repetitive geometric forms through colour, contrast and abstraction. Circles, hypnotic spirals, and starfish jut from the canvas in luminous, explosive, colourful compositions. Adding powdered pumice to acrylic paint creates Nahas’s three-dimensional textures. He produces these psychedelic compositions using a style he developed where heavily encrusted, brightly coloured organic shapes rigorously repeat themselves to infinity, bringing to mind the principles of Fractal Geometry as well as the multiplication of single patterns one finds in Islamic art. His universe, where order reigns over chaos, seems to be caught between microcosm and macrocosm; it is playful and vibrant yet simultaneously, subliminal questions can be raised.
His most prominent works are those of the Fractal series of which the present work entitled Sedona is part. It is a rendering of a range of red sandstones in Arizona. He began this series in the mid-1990s, and has been revisiting it since then. In these compositions, Nahas explores the realms of science and nature applying them to the canvas using various techniques to emulate biological growth and the patterns of nature. His work, known for being highly decorative and textured, investigates material culture and how one is able to achieve an adroit aura using impasto mixed with layers upon layers of materials to create this intense reminiscence of the coral in the sea. By combining a distinct artistic perspective with unique technical indexes, Nahas is able to explore the essence of different contemporary styles.
The term fractal refers to the theory of fractal geometry, formulated in the mid-1970s by Benoît Mandelbrot (1924-2010). Mandelbrot described random events in nature deviating from the ideal Euclidean geometry, the rough and fragmented geometric shapes which can be split into parts, each of which is at least approximately a reduced size copy of the whole. According to Mandelbrot, things typically considered to be 'rough', a 'mess' or 'chaotic', like clouds or shorelines, actually had a degree of order. Nahas saw the parallels with his own work as his Fractals paintings also represent a kind of asymmetrical equilibrium. As a result, this relationship between order and disorder continues to be a recurrent theme in the artist's work across all the different bodies of work.
These pieces differ substantially in size and colour, each inducing a different mood. The smallest are like windows into an underwater world of coral reefs while the larger works, breath-taking in their intricacy, simply subsume the observer. On the one hand they look like enveloped surfaces of behemoths and on the other they resemble abnormalities that are visible only on a microscopic scale–the false colour images of a scanning electron microscope. The subtle variations in tone and colour that ripple across the mottled surfaces of these Fractals is both like the speckled light of tropical seas and like the mineral deposits in a slice of marble.