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? On the contrary, we should be
speaking about the interior, opening 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 through the history of art,” writes
Antonin Artaud, “from Holbein to Ingres, who finally
succeeded in making the face of man speak.”
Probably Nezir’s objective is the opposite: 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, transistor, 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 at entering directly
into it, to mix in an
incredible sort of fusion with natural anatomic rhythms.
The Turkish artist Nezir calls this sort of image Physiomechanical,
a physiology profaned by technology. We find ourselves not
in front of an image de clef, but rather an image far too
limpid, revealed by symbolic echoes. It declares, affirms
to the point of becoming a sort of blasphemous abbreviation,
repeated in a thousand variations. Which suggests 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.
Of ultimate interest is the process of inevitably sliding
from the certain to the uncertain, from the physical to the
metaphysical, attained especially in recent paintings. The
figure seems to have lost all compositional rigor, with visual
sharpness created by the transformation of colors toward the
steely and metallic. Otherwise it seems to incarnate poetic
nuance, to transform itself into something transitory. It
neither closes nor encloses, it reacts no longer like an opaque
or insulated body, but becomes in a certain sense transparent,
permitting the filtering of vision beyond itself, carrying
vision on a slippery, impalpable spatial game.
We recall certain of Leonardo’s solutions which seem
always based on making attention penetrate beyond the focal
point. This going beyond the veil of appearances lets one
follow the course of each painting into a fantastical-scientific
journey to the very depths of the human organism or the collapse
of nature. A strange light shines from Nezir’s most
recent paintings, revealing the entirety of the anthill of
shadows, of presences, which impose themselves behind the
image. At times it seems that the former unity of the body
dissolves into a series of countless masks, films, doubles
(the famous echo), with no defined limits.
Can we say then that man has escaped from himself and merged
into the infinity of the cosmos? Nezir most certainly does
not deny trying to show the loss of identity suffered by the
individual and the world. What should be the flight of perspective
becomes, in reality, form which is undone and disappears between
excesses of shadow and light. To follow, one needs the skill
of an acrobat. Everything is inversed and reversed, revealing
itself as a congestion of details, as if the artist wanted
to paint the smallest thing – dust, a molecule –
to better translate the fragmentation of everyday life. Moreover,
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
so what goes out the door (via the image) comes back in through
the window (i.e., 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. Nezir 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 understand
the sense and the depth of Nezir’s work: “Comedy,”
writes Faibleman,”is the debacle of things as they are,
trying to become things as they should be.” Nezir strives
to represent this very debacle, this failure: the impossibility
of attaining the essence, of getting to the heart of things.
In attempting to do so, the artist often loses his way in
a maze of mirrors, finally confronting his own image. This
is the great, inescapable game of the
pendulum swinging between reality and dream, between technical
exquisiteness and arcane mysteries, between self and others.
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