Dr.
Paolo RIZZI (Art
Critic)
Venezia _ ITA
.A
female nude is before us, offering herself, surrounded by a mysterious
azure light. She seems taken from a Northern European painting of
the early Renaissance. But something is wrong : on one shoulder,
under the breast and over the pubis are strange little tubes,
worm-like filaments which seem made of plastic..
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Strange
and contrasted ; these are the primary characteristics of this troubling
Turkish artist who, after spending ten years in Austria, Germany
and France, comes to exhibit here in Venice. A new and original
presence, who touches the very heart of today’s man.
Nezir paints with the old masters constantly
in mind, but with the consciousness of the tense duality of an age
torn between humanism and a fascination with technology. He calls
his paintings « psychomechanical ». In them, man’s physiology
is contaminated by a sort of mechanical leprosy, which insinuates
itself (in the form of fine plastic tubes, pumps, manometers, switches
and levers) on and in the bald and deteriorating flesh of his figures.
An artifice that places the technological monster within man himself
in the form of incredible growths. This is accomplished while avoiding
the artificial technicity of fashionable neosurrealism. Nezir points
to the great European tradition. Certain paintings and drawings
done as a young painter from Tatvan, Eastern Anatolia (Nezir is
of Kurdish origin), during his first four-year stay in Vienna, while
still ignorant of the influence of 15th century German materialism,
are most surprising.
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There
is obviously the innate affinity to European pictorial devices.
There was something that pushed him to root out the oriental
tradition and replace it with the thick meandering of Nordic
fable. With the years, cultural affinities defined themselves
even if it seems that Nezir reached for a sort of general
climate more than a precise model. It is indubitable that
the influence of Leonardo from the very beginning plays an
important role. There are also the references to Bruegel in
the physical deformations, the aristocratic figures from the
protorenaissance of Dürer, the mystery of Cranach, the
aerial viewpoint, swarming with life, of Altdorfer. |
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