La Commedia dell'Arte
(By Luigi Meneghelli - Verona-Italia)

...A painting of perfection to represent imperfection, errorless work which points to error, the undoing that an image possesses in its very being. Nezir proceeds from the depths of this fatal deviation, from this dark duality; an analytical point of view, accomplished forms, infallible chromatic makeup, which usher forth the hereafter, partly dissimulated, shadows or at least the illusion of a mysterious and horrendous transformation. The face and figure are pushed forward, to a shocking foreground, they fill the page with their cumbersome presence. But why speak of shock and blockage when, on the contrary, we should be speaking about the interior, open ourselves before the secret of human traits ?

Because, perhaps, in reality the traits seal the face making it a closed façade, an isolated world, a fleeing form; perhaps because all looks have an "expressionless expression", they look into nothingness, the beyond; because each portrait possesses an element of the standardized, the robotic. But has there ever been an artist who could get past the obstacle of physiognomy? "I don't know of a single painter throughout the history of art", writes Antonin Artaud, "from Holbein to Ingres, who finally succeeded in making the face of man speak." But Nezir's objective is probably the contrary: that is to make the face remain silent, or better, to show the impossibility of voice, expression, movement. . Each human form is made up of mechanomorphic insertions and "montages" ( little .wheels, screws, transistors, steel skull caps), a sort of Arts Combinatoria, a puzzle, an Arcimboldo of the post-industrial age,

but where the ingenious caprices of a mannerist painter aim no longer at creating a head, but rather, to enter directly into it, to become an integral part of it, to mix in an incredible sort of fusion with natural anatomic rhythms. The Turkish artist calls this sort of image Physiomechanical, a physiology profaned by technology. We find ourselves not in front of an image d clef, but rather, an image far too limpid, revealed by symbolic echoes.

    It declares, affirms to the point of becoming a sort of blasphemy, repeated in a thousand variations.

    But blasphemy could suggest something easily grasped, a code of composition utterly unmasked, something which cannot be said of Nezir insofar as his ideological objective is pursued through an incredible contamination of styles ; echoes which pass through Leonardo's clouds, to the brutal deformations of Breugel the Elder, exuberant deformations of a Parmigianino with the disturbing open perspectives of Redon.

....What is important is to attain the inevitable process of sliding from the certain to the uncertain, from the physical to the metaphysical.

... In the recent paintings, the figure above all seems to have lost all compositional rigor along with the visual sharpness created by the transformation of colors towards the steely and metallic.  It seems on the contrary to incarnate poetic nuance, to transform itself under the sign of passing.  It neither closes itself nor closes, it reacts no longer like an opaque or insulated body, but becomes in a certain sense a transparent body, which permits the filtering of vision beyond itself, carrying vision on a slippery, impalpable spatial game. At this moment, memory recalls certain of

Leonardo's solutions which seem based on penetrating attention, capable of going beyond the veil of appearances and letting the course of painting enter into a fantastico-scientific voyage, to the very depths of the human organism or to the collapse of nature.  A strange light shines from Nezir's most recent paintings.  It reveals the entirety of the anthill of shadows, of presence, which impose themselves behind the image.  At times, we have the impression that the former unity of the body dissolves in a series of countless masks, of films, doubles (the famous echo) with no clear limits. .Can we then say that man has escaped from himself and has gotten lost in the cosmos?  Nezir most certainly does not ease his tone of accusation of the total loss of identity of persons and the world.  In this way what should be the flight of perspective becomes, in reality, form which is undone and disappears between the excesses of shadow and light.  Following becomes an exercise worthy of an acrobat.

...  Everything is inverse and reversed- revealing itself as a congestion of details, as if the artist wanted to paint the smallest thing, dust, a molecule, thus to better translate the fragmentation of everyday life.  What is more, the dizzying swinging and balancing movement allows the viewer glimpses not of natural images but of images of Consumerism (buildings, airplanes, arms, idols, advertising, etc.) and thus, what goes out the door (via the image) comes back in through the window (via the exterior world): the same metallic colors, the same sense of obstruction, the same forced composition...

    But we know that all forced gestures tend toward caricature, toward the haggard aspect of the mask.  And the mask, as Swift observed, is the game of negation, the appearance of something which is not.  N6zir attains this result above all with the graphic, a grouping of minimal traits, an insistent punctuation to reveal something fantastic or consumed by irony.  There is the mythic satyr which approaches the disheveled Mona Lisa, there is a suite of physiognomies which recall W. Hogart's "Characters and Caricatures", there is populist and demonic snickering that reminds us of Breugel... each new impulse, each new violation does not add but subtracts, does not approach reality, but rather falsehood, pantomime, comedy.

    Only Faibleman's definition of comedy can help us to understand the sense and the depth of Nezir's work: "Comedy", writes Faibleman," is the debacle toward which the things as they are go in the effort to approach the things as they should be." Nezir strives to represent this same debacle, this failure: the impossibility of touching being, of getting, to the heart of things.

    To get there, the artist often loses his way, is confused by mirrors only to find himself confronted with his own image.  This is the great game and it is impossible to escape: its a pendulum between the real and the dream, between the beauty of technical devices and fathomless mysteries, between oneself and others.