Nabil Nahas : Perpetual Energy
by Vincent Katz

That this is the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of the work of Nabil Nahas is cause for celebration and also for surprise.  Hasn’t he been working assiduously in New York City since the 1970s, creating significant bodies of work and exhibiting them at prominent New York galleries?  Hasn’t he impressed critics not only with his technical expertise but also with the restlessness of his intellect?  Hasn’t he been an artist who has always excited audiences by the tactile nature of his surfaces, the ambitious scale his works gracefully employ, and the unexpected images and colors that spring forth from them?  The affirmative responses to these questions lead us to ponder why Nahas, for all his impressive artistic achievement, has not had a museum retrospective before now.  A thorough examination of his work will reveal the particular pleasures we have been missing.

Something essential to Nahas, and to his art, is his hybridity.  Born in Beirut in 1949, Nahas spent his first 10 years in Cairo.  His father was a textile manufacturer, who would take Nabil to the factory, where he remembers being impressed by the looms and the colors of the fabrics.  At home, there was a collection of Chinese porcelain and conservative French figure painters, who were reacting against the avant-garde trends of the time.  Nabil’s uncle, Antoine Nahas, was the leading architect in Egypt at the time, sparking an interest in architecture that would persist throughout Nabil’s career.  As any child might be, he was fascinated by the pyramids and the sphinx.  Having access to those antiquities helped foster a lifelong sense of the connections between ancient and modern.  The material culture in Cairo, and later in Beirut, gave Nabil a sense of the importance of craft in art: technical expertise, cultural, inherited values of design, composition and color.

Returning to Beirut at the age of 10, Nahas’ appreciation of these cultural values deepened, as did his awareness of the world to the west.  His mother owned a shop, L’Amethyste, which sold crystals and fossils.  Nahas remembers being fascinated by these forms and the light effects they created.  His mother’s cousin, Yvette Achkar, was an abstract painter influenced by De Staël, whose work and commitment provided an early example to Nahas of the possibility of being a painter.  In fact, he started painting almost by accident.  At boarding school in the mountains of Antoura, he was taking piano lessons.  When his music teacher died of old age, Nahas switched to painting lessons, because it was the only other alternative available.  Nahas remembers the instructor “was a terribly flamboyant teacher who use to copy paintings by Renoir and have me watch him do it.  I guess watching him at work was both amusing and gave me a technical idea of how it was done.”   At this time, nature played an important role in the young artist’s development — both as a place to escape from the routine and discipline of school, and also as a personal, aesthetic inspiration.  As Nahas relates, “On the weekends, I would go with my friend Roy Sarrafian to Byblos, where we would spend the day trying to find amulets revealed by erosion.  I guess in Lebanon I found a sense of freedom.”

Nahas’ decision to go to the United States for university, although not unprecedented for children of Christian Lebanese families, was still unusual.  It would have been much more common for a Lebanese youth in the 1960s to want to go to Paris.  Nahas had somehow developed a strong connection to what was happening in the New York art world.  “I had acquired a book surveying contemporary abstract art of the 1950s,” he reveals, “covering Europe and the United States.  At the time, I preferred the New York School (Pollock and Rothko) to that of Paris (Soulages or Manessier).  My aim was to end up in New York City.”

This desire led him first to Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, where he earned a BFA in 1971.  This move from the Middle East to the United States marked the beginning of a path that the artist is still on today.  Nahas seems to have an urge, a need one might say, to change from anything that becomes too comfortable.  One can see that need clearly in his art, where his restlessness requires him to change styles with alarming rapidity.  On the other hand, one could make the argument that his work is all of a piece, that all of it relates to a shared basis of common aesthetic concerns.

At Louisiana State, Nahas already began working with a sophisticated abstract aesthetic.  Realizing he wanted to pursue this route, expanding this base with further education, Nahas settled on one of the most advanced and active graduate art programs of the time, that of Yale University, where he graduated with an MFA in 1973.  Headed for years by the brilliant technician and teacher Josef Albers, the Yale art department was known for its eclectic approach to aesthetics.  While at Yale, Nahas encountered the artists Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Pearlstein, Larry Poons, Frank Stella, Alex Katz, Brice Marden, and the influential critic, Clement Greenberg.  Nahas also worked under the abstract painter Al Held, with whom he had a relationship he characterizes as mentor-student, even after he finished at Yale.  “Artists were visiting all the time at Yale,” he explains.  The great thing was meeting those people, those mythical names, and then seeing they’re just like you and me, that the life of an artist is a possibility.  I think perhaps the most important thing I got from being at Yale was shattering the myth of the artist as a near-god figure.”  Nahas realized that there was a chance for him, not only to make art but what is much trickier: to be an artist.  To do that, he knew he would need to move to New York.

If we look at the period during which Nabil Nahas has been working — the 1970s to the present — we recognize that is has been a period of great aesthetic turbulence.  When Nahas began painting, the hegemony of the abstract esthetic, expressed most forcefully by the critic Clement Greenberg, was still in effect.  Greenberg had expounded a Hegelian theory, by which painting should progressively purify itself by abandoning all illusionistic procedures.  Abjuring the humanistic achievements of the Renaissance — those pictorial devices which seem to put man in realistic spatial relationship to his world — the artist would now use modern approaches to reflect a world that had lost its humanistic values, as evidenced by the mechanized horrors of the 20th century.  Principal among modern beliefs would be the recognition that painting is made on a two-dimensional plane.  The painting must always make that clear: planes must not overlap, there must be no use of classical perspective.  Even more decisive than perspective, to Greenberg’s mind, was the use of chiaroscuro, the contrasting of light and dark passages in patterns to give convincing sensations of three-dimensional depth.  Even the great Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline received Greenberg’s disapproval for what he perceived to be Kline’s desire to preserve chiaroscuro in its most elemental form by reducing his imagery to black and white.

            Techniques such as pouring, dripping, staining, that were distinct from the classical use of brush, were praised as forward-looking.  Imagery had to be unconditionally abstract.  The momentum of Greenberg’s pronouncements had such force in the New York art world that they began to seem like inevitable truths.  Artists who introduced identifiable images into their work — de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, and ultimately the Pop Artists — were considered retrograde under this view.  Minimalism and Conceptualism were the logical outgrowths of the progressive view, as was, ultimately, the belief, held by many, that painting itself — a bourgeois form suited to decorate the homes of controllers of the means of production — must be abandoned for forms over which the power elite could not hold decisive influence. 

            This was still the critical climate in the early 1970s, when Nabil Nahas began his career as a young painter.  Once settled in New York, he found the actual art scene much more diverse than a reading of books or magazine articles might reveal.  In fact, painting always continued; it was only its direction as a leading cultural force that was up for grabs.  In fact, this period was one in which a multiplicity of approaches to art-making vied for attention, a period not unlike the present in some respects.  Minimal art was still very strong, and Conceptualism was evolving into Earth Works and performance pieces in which the artist’s body was put to tests of physical endurance.  Painting was often following the last trails of Greenbergian modernism, following on stain and color field painting.  In another, not yet understood, quarter, artists were taking painting in a new direction, embracing the use of the human form and painterly qualities invoked by the collision of brush and canvas.

Of the artists Nahas cites as having visited Yale while he was there, Frank Stella and Larry Poons can be seen as most influential on work Nahas was doing in the ‘70s in New York.  Stella had re-introduced geometry to large-scale New York School painting, with a painterly line in his early works, developing a hard edge as the 1960s progressed.  Poons had a similarly detached style in the 1960s, his blips and dots evoking geometric forms, as well as shapes on television screens.  Both artists were highly visible in the 1960s.  Al Held too had a decisive influence on Nahas during his Yale years and after.  Held was a maverick artist, who changed from a particular brand of Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1950s to exaggeratedly blunt hard-edge abstraction in the early 1960s to black and white illusionistic geometric abstractions by the mid 1960s. 

The first works Nahas exhibited in New York, in the first of three exhibitions at the Robert Miller Gallery, used geometric forms, but they are far from the rectangles of Mondrian and Albers.  They are also different from Held’s geometries, which, for all their contortions, seem to be generated from Euclidean forms.  Nahas, in a painting like Ardebil (1977), uses geometry in a less recognizable way.  It does not feel like “geometry” per se, but more like decorative motif, which is not surprising, given his immersion in Islamic art.  There are at least three layers of superimposed motifs in this work, typical for this period.  In another 1977 work, Orion, a more Euclidean form, a pyramid, is centrally apparent, but even in this work the lines shooting away from this pyramid explode the geometry, and there is the continued blurring effect of layering. 

By the following year, a drastic change had occurred.  The delicate colors and merging effects of the 1977 works had yielded to much brighter tonalities, and delicacy had been replaced by hard-edged certainties of Euclidean geometry.  Perhaps gaining confidence from the first works, Nahas now felt emboldened to make a more definitive statement.  The fact is that these works relate more clearly to the work of Nahas’ mentor, Held.  Nahas’ paintings were rapidly moving towards another evolution in style.  By 1979-80, the sharp-edged geometry was becoming more thickly layered, and the edges were becoming less sharp, more painterly.  These early developments are fascinating, as they show the artist constantly re-evaluating his own achievement.  This critical attitude to his own work remains a constant throughout Nahas’ career, revealing itself in an oeuvre that is often on the move to an unpredictable place.

It would have been hard to predict what happened next at this point in Nahas’ career as a painter of geometric abstractions.  “One day I was painting the geometric pictures,” he remembers, “and I started painting black canvases.  It was very interesting, because it was like someone else was painting the pictures, not me, and I was really curious to see what the hell was actually going on!”  What was going on was a complete re-invention — in a sense, these are Nahas’ first works that are free from the influences of Greenberg, Stella, Held, and the others in that modernist tradition.  They are black canvases, some quite large, many with a decidedly vertical format, featuring white and grey markings that are sometimes that result of dripping techniques, others of extremely deliberate mark-making.  These works bring up many references.  In some, one sees hints of Giacometti’s attenuated human figures.  In others, scratch marks evoke the skeletons of fish or other creatures.  Elsewhere, they are simply marks, which can evoke the scratches of graffiti on ancient walls.  Sometimes, the shapes seem like windows or doors cut into dark spaces.  Above all, one senses a somberness to the palette and also to the mark-making.  Free from geometrical restraint, the artist’s hand is given full responsibility.  We may wonder why he took this leap at this particular moment.  The geo-political realities of the time may provide a context for pondering this question.  1982 marked one of the worst periods in the civil war that had been raging for years in Lebanon.  Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization had begun using Lebanon as a battlefield, and on July 17, 1981, Israel bombed apartment buildings in West Beirut that housed PLO offices.  At least 300 civilians died, with 800 wounded.  By June, 1982, things were considerably worse, as Israel invaded Lebanon, laying siege to West Beirut; the PLO retaliated by shelling Christian East Beirut.  Ultimately, more than 20,000 people died, the majority of them civilians.  The country of Nahas’ youth, which had been so pregnant with natural beauty for the young man, was now the ground for perennial war.  The way of life and the physical culture of Beirut had been shattered.  Nahas’ black paintings may be his muted response to that situation.

This was a period when Nahas was without gallery representation, having left Robert Miller after his third exhibition.  In the mid to late 1980s, Nahas’ work began to confront the issue of scale in a provocative way.  Still dominated by the somber grounds of the black paintings, his new works were submerged in washes of gold paint.  In his mid-1980s pieces, black, gold and red competed for attention in ways that foreshadow the usages of those colors in some of Nahas’ most recent paintings.  In the slightly later pieces, from 1987 and 1988, the colors merge and blend, as though one is looking at liquid atmospheres.  These large gold paintings attempt to come to grips with the legacy of the great Abstract Expressionist painters.  Pollock, Rothko, Newman and others, in rebelling against the School of Paris, had made size, and its appropriate scalar usage, an archetypally American achievement.  To paint after them was to have to take their standard of scale into account.  With the gold paintings, Nahas began moving towards what we can now see as his major aesthetic statements — his work from the 1990s to the present. 

After the gold paintings, Nahas made what he refers to as his “Circle” paintings, a title which can be misleading.  They comprise a series of paintings in three sizes — 42 inches square, 48 inches square, and 60 inches square — done during 1988 and 1989.  While it is true that globe-like forms appear in these works, they seem much more inspired by the natural world than by a contemplation of pure geometric forms.  They came about as the result of an accident.  Nahas was mixing diamond dust, mica, aluminum, and earth into acrylic paint.  Water repellent fell onto the painting and made the first globe.  In these paintings, unlike the blips of Poons, Nahas’ small circles do not seem to be painted on backgrounds but rather to be integral elements within viscous seas.  For the first time, Nahas achieves something that will soon become an increasingly effective part of his repertoire — the ability to make a surface that does not depict an abstract picture but rather is a three-dimensional pictorial surface.  In these paintings, the third dimension is thin, but one gets definite impressions that these surfaces are of a substance — whether metallic or liquid.  Simultaneously, in 1988, Nahas created large-scale paintings combining black, bright red, and white paint in ways that look back to the Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb in their interest in specific shapes made by the brushstroke.

In the following years, Nahas made two pivotal pieces that pushed his work into a more original sphere, where it has been acclaimed in the art world by those interested in the future (and past) of the art of painting.  There were technical, aesthetic, and procedural decisions that led to this breakthrough work.   After years of having been inspired by the natural world and perhaps attempting to recapture something of a lost idyllic nature in the mountains of Antoura, Nahas had a revelation while walking on the beach in East Hampton, New York.  He saw the form of a starfish and realized he wanted to include it in a work of art, thus initiating a technical innovation in his work.  The painting Eureka (1991, diptych in acrylic, each panel 10 x 8 inches) became the first in a series that continues to this day, using the form of the echinoderm as a structural component.  The star appealed to Nahas as a formal element, almost geometric but with edges rounded by life’s vicissitudes, not a perfect ideal form of the mind. “Eureka could be a link — if we wanted it to,” the artist has said.   In this small diptych, Nahas first attached an actual echinoderm to the surface of an art work, here combined with the formal language of circles reminiscent of his ’88-’89 paintings.  In many paintings to come, Nahas would use starfish as a compositional or support element — in some, the bodies of the animals are three-dimensional collage-like pieces that form the paint-receiving surface, while in others, their role is more subtle, as they create the base of a layering system hidden from view, their shapes contributing an essential ebb and flow.  Soon after beginning to work with starfish, Nahas realized he needed many more than he could collect and started to make latex casts of the animals.

The aesthetic change in these works can be seen as a further remove from the American tradition of geometry, fostered by modernist values, towards a more European and Islamic compositional base.  Nahas’ acumen as a collector is well-known, and a visit to his loft reveals an interest in a range of styles and periods.  He was an early appreciator of the work of painter Chaim Soutine and the writer and draughtsman Henri Michaux.  It is Michaux’s influence particularly that we can see in the next body of work Nahas developed.  Michaux’s ink drawings captivate with the freeness of their blob-like forms, which morph back and forth between abstract nothings and humanoid or animal-like figures.  Arrayed across the sheet, they remain in constant motion, no one mark or image taking precedence over any other.  Something similar can be said of Pollock’s skeins and drips, but in Pollock there is always the sense of a grand statement, even if that statement is not translatable into words.  Michaux, on the other hand, was a reclusive figure, and his works speak of this.  His travels and writings on psychedelic drugs were legendary, attracting the praise of writers Allen Ginsberg and Jorge Luis Borges.  There is no grandeur in Michaux’s drawings, only a brilliant delicacy.  The shapes in Nahas’ first group of starfish paintings are often reminiscent of Michaux’s, albeit in larger sizes and brighter colors.

Another aesthetic tradition, of which Nahas had already availed himself and which comes to the fore in these pieces, is that of Islamic art.  One of the most striking aspects of many Islamic works is the non-hierarchical presentation of many small forms within a large confining rectangle.  The scholar Oleg Grabar has observed that the “…procedure of identifying the vocabulary of an art may not be entirely adequate or sufficient to explore and explain the mainstream of Islamic art.  For in reality the skills and energies of almost all craftsmen and artists were directed in a way which minimizes the meaning of any one motif.  Personages or animals are rarely given a greater visual importance than vegetal backgrounds.  In fact, the very notion of a background is open to doubt, as almost all motifs appear on the same level of perceptibility.  On the mihrab [Illustration: Mihrab, Isfahan, fourteenth century, Metropolitan Museum of Art], for instance, it is impossible to decide whether the white or light blue patterns are the main ones…”   The same is true of an eleventh century ivory plaque from Spain, in which human figures are of equal size and importance as geese and giant thistle bushes.  [Illustration: Ivory plaque, Spain, eleventh century, 8” long (detail)]

In 1997, a sea change occurred. His painting Silver Wind (1997) was the first to incorporate pumice stone into acrylic paint.  With this decision, Nahas arrived at a new procedure for making paintings.  Working on top of a floor of latex starfish molds, Nahas began painstakingly accreting this paint-pumice mix in tightly controlled dabs and dollops.  As Carter Ratcliff pointed out in his catalogue essay for Nahas’ exhibition at Sperone Westwater gallery in 1997, these works could not be made by gesture, separating them from the tradition of the New York School painters.  Each bit of color had to be the result of conscious forethought.  The artist worked slowly, building forms and color relations simultaneously.  The variations in these works are seemingly endless — some are enormous, some quite small; some are brightly colored, with tonalities that bring Yves Klein’s blue to mind, while others are somber, almost black, with slight edgings of color; some seem to be vegetal growths on an ocean floor, while others glow with an eerie internal light.  In all of them, when seen in person, there is the intensely tactile quality of the material that makes one feel that one is in the presence of the thing itself, as opposed to looking at a picture of a thing.

In 2005, Nahas took this process a step further with a series of small works and two large ones that he exhibited at Sperone Westwater.  He called the small pieces Fractals, specifying a relationship to the theories of Benoît Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot had worked on Chaos theory, which analyzes random occurrences; he coined the term “fractal” in 1975 as the result of his work with inconsistencies in the natural world, in comparison to ideal geometry.  As Mandelborat noted, “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones; coastlines are not circles; and bark is not smooth.  Nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”   Many critics have observed the chronological and philosophical links between the need for Chaos Theory and the toppling of Greenbergian modernism.  As Bonnie Clearwater put it, “The rejection of the determinist system of modernism by postmodern artists paralleled a phenomenon that occurred in mathematics with the rise of Chaos theory and fractal geometry.”   One of the key elements of fractal geometry is the idea that the micro and macro are analogous (Mandelbrot called it self-similarity and scale invariance); in Nahas’ art this would translate to mean that similar shapes are repeated on small and large scale.  The small 2005 pieces are significant in another way.  They are the result of Nahas’ finding the detritus of process from larger pieces around his studio and recycling it to create independent works, which he stylized by mounting them and adding drawn or painted designs.  Often, they show the part of the process invisible to us in the large works — the underside of the accretion of acrylic-pumice mixtures.

Many artists who came to the fore in the 1980s were very conscious of how meaning was constructed in their work.  Artist Joseph Kosuth has written, “I think there is a certain responsibility of the artist to fight for the meaning of her or his work.  It is as much a part of the making process as the manipulation of materials; without that struggle art becomes just another job.”   The painter Peter Halley claimed that the meaning of his rectilinear images was antithetical to that of previous geometric art; his was meant as a critique of what he considered an authoritarian idealism.  With Nahas, there is no irony at work and little self-consciousness.  What makes his work so appealing is the guilelessness of his images.  His took geometry at face value, as something with inherent imagistic power, which he manipulated in individual ways.  Since those early days, he has continually searched for a personal means of expression as inspiring as the level of technical brilliance with which he invests his search.  On the other hand, his need for change has caused him to reject identifiable styles, occasionally painting in two styles simultaneously.  This has sometimes contributed to a confusion in viewers of Nahas’ work regarding the kind of artist-created meaning Kosuth identified.

The leap past the limits of what he has done before in Nahas’ most recent work has by now become expected from this master of surprise.  In addition to furthering his exploration of the acrylic-pumice works, with increased levity and openness of form, Nahas has embarked on a series of paintings that combine realism and abstraction in a painterly, post-expressionistic mode.  Many of these works include identifiable images of palm, olive and cedar trees from his native land.  These odes to his origins — and also to nature — create powerful poetry that will resonate with viewers wherever they are from, but particularly with those for whom these symbolic entities are part of their native environment.  There is darkness and destruction lurking in Nahas’ most recent works, but there is also present a concerted delicacy, as if to say a smile or a beautiful flower can console one — or more than that, get one ready for next act of creation.