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La
Commedia dell'Arte
(By Luigi Meneghelli
- Verona-Italia)
A
...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 ?
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BBecause, 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,
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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. |
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. 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.
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