Nabil Nahas

Agial Art Gallery, Beirut 
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Sperone Westwater, Nabil Nahas: New Paintings, March - April 1999
Sao Paolo, Lebanese Pavillion, XXV Bienal de São Paulo, March - June 2002

This work in very good condition. All surface irregularities are in line with the artist's working process. There are some very faint and discoloured handling marks along the outer edges of the canvas. The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, with the overall tonality being slightly softer and gentler in the original work.
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Nabil Nahas is Lebanon's most renowned abstract artist, having established himself in the New York art scene through the unique combination of texture and colour that exists within his work. His oeuvre has subsequently gained an enthusiastic following within the more recently developed Middle-Eastern art scene. Although formerly trained in Western painting, Nahas draws his inspiration from a diverse range of influences, primarily nature, as well as the geometric patterns evident in decorative Islamic art. His most prominent works are coral textured fractal paintings, which are created by dense layering of acrylic paint texturised with powdered pumice and pigmented with vivid colours: this method is brilliantly employed in the surface of Vesta, Nahas’s works offer an organic quality which is unusual within the sphere of contemporary abstract art, and his works are a reflection of nature and childhood memories of indigenous landscapes.

Vesta is defined by its heavily encrusted surface comprising organic geometric forms that protrude from the canvas in luminous hues. The repetition of shapes seems to reach infinity, echoing the elaborate patterns found within Islamic art. By reiterating one singular form, the artist effectively conjures notions of the spontaneous evolution of organic life within nature.  In Vesta, he embraces and visually reinterprets the irregularities of the natural world’s geometry, translating his canvas plane into an illustriously textured terrain covered in a network of crevices and narrow gaps as deep as two or three inches which suggest an intricate pattern of erosion, mineral accretion or biological growth. The canvas tissue pulses as if it were a breathing organism, the sculptural crust assuming a pictorial existence. He brings his iconic perception of scale, opulence and sheer sumptuousness to the heavily coated Vesta, pigmented in bright glowing shades. Seemingly abstract at first sight, Vesta imperceptibly exceeds the limitations typically prescribed to non-objective art.

Nahas’ paintings are literal; his images are always taken from something and often infer movement and refer to a moment in time. In the case of the present work Nahas has taken inspiration from the minor-planet designation, Vesta. One of the largest asteroids in the Solar System, it was discovered by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers in 1807, and is named after the virgin goddess of home and hearth from Roman mythology.  Vesta is the brightest asteroid visible from Earth and is the last remaining rocky protoplanet which has lost some of its mass due to a collision, leaving an enormous crater in its southern hemisphere. Debris from this astronomical cataclysm has since fallen to Earth in the form of meteorites, the influence of which can be observed in the textured surface of this work.

Nahas’ optical phenomenons create fantastical visual illusions which dip into the realm of the imaginary. He generates from grainy fact an ethereal luminosity which cannot be observed in our surroundings. Within Nahas’ oeuvre, the freedom of scale opens his work to the concept of infinite, a quality derivative of his inspiration for the phantasmagorical piece Vesta.