• Nadia Ayari: Multiplicity

    Date posted: September 13, 2011 Author: jolanta

    I have always felt that the materiality of painting has the visceral command necessary to address the hardest of subjects.

    My interest in the eye began a few years ago. In it, I found a character that focuses complex narratives into simple, abstract forms. This reduction is paired in my recent work with the multiplicity of various eye-forms to create surrealist canvases that expose the complexity of my political experience. Living half a world away from my native Tunisia,

    “Living half a world away from my native Tunisia, I have felt increasingly isolated by the political climate of the last decade.”

     
    Ayari, Nadia, This Place, 2010. Oil on canvas, 82 x 75 in. Courtesy of the artist and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York.

    Nadia Ayari: Multiplicity
    Nadia Ayari

    I have always felt that the materiality of painting has the visceral command necessary to address the hardest of subjects.

    My interest in the eye began a few years ago. In it, I found a character that focuses complex narratives into simple, abstract forms. This reduction is paired in my recent work with the multiplicity of various eye-forms to create surrealist canvases that expose the complexity of my political experience. Living half a world away from my native Tunisia, I have felt increasingly isolated by the political climate of the last decade. The toppling of the Tunisian government in January 2011, the first revolution of the “Arab Spring,” was no exception.

    Inevitably, the scope of those events has caused my work to be interpreted through particular lenses. Aware of the perils of these readings, I was careful that these latest paintings, with their thick impasto, rhythmical compositions, bright colors, and calligraphic lines emphatically would defy absolute interpretation. I aimed for their beauty to contain a sense of threat and painted them meticulously so that their seeming simplicity is deceiving: the eyes are at once domes, webs, figs, nipples, and missile heads.

    I was also looking to these paintings, each of which is rather abstract, to present a narrative when grouped together. Eyes transform from one canvas to the next, shifting in color and orientation. They appear in This Place as a crew of large, pink shapes loosely dispersed on a field, as tight rows of blue irises gently bumping into one another in Alone, and as an upside-down line of nearly interweaving lashes in Curfew. Meanwhile, in Balcony, the eyes are utterly camouflaged as oversized figs sparsely placed against a bright blue sky. The stubbornness of this character, its resilience to context, and its eagerness to confront the world offer an analogy to the political realities to which we have been witness.

    In my next group of paintings, I think I will use images of fingers to address various social aspects of the political structures we enable.

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