Behind The Scenes | NABIL SAOUABI

May 18th, 2023 - July 15th, 2023 | Bhar Lazrag

This exhibition of the artist's new work will be a transcendent visual experience that will make us travel through space and time between the registers and themes dear to the artist, disrupting the boundaries between the real and the fictional.

From history painting, to cinema, to Stevenson's Treasure Island, the work of staging is pushed into places hitherto unexplored by the artist; with characters from Disney masterpiece characters, self-portraits, paper boats, figurines, birds, inverted landscapes...

Behind The Scenes, or in the wings, the artist quietly lets flowers grow on his head, he metamorphoses and his work also metamorphoses, taking place in a setting of trees, flowers, stones, landscapes in an exuberant palette layer by layer element by element, which eludes the impression and seems to vacillate between the natural and the artificial. The painted landscapes are not synonymous with nature; they are the transcription of the artist's inner fascination in his relationship to the world.
It is a multiform work in its genesis, which borrows from the adventure novel, literature, the history of painting, cinema, and even animation the facets of its construction and elaboration. It draws codes and signs from them to elaborate its own syntax.

The artist has proceeded to a near-perfect fusion and a virtuosic tuning of a multitude of references, themes, and elements. To approach his works, one must tune in as perfectly as possible to the rhythms they propose and to the conduits that make it work. The themes, genres, and materials invested by the artist sometimes escape the global understanding of his work, which precisely refuses a global and hackneyed understanding, to enclose within its minute components the primordial meaning of the artist's expression.

Behind the Scenes is a film, a novel, a scenario a painting exhibition, a fiction ? Behind the Scenes is a form that has introduced a style. A style that contains a spirit, a temperament, an imagined conception of the world and of the relationship to the world. A style which, in the diversity of its resources, its influences, and its references, has been able to establish and institute itself stone by stone.

ARTIST: NABIL SAOUABI


︎ Viewing Room

Chapter I: Citation and painting

Citation is an art, a task that must open or reopen onto an elsewhere, onto a beyond. Citation for N.S. is synonymous with questioning a history, a heritage, a tradition that is painting. He explores the arcane depths of the history of painting, and not only that, of literature as well. Everything that can shake his senses is implemented in his work explicitly or implicitly.

The soldiers of Edouard Manet's The Execution of Maximilian is a very explicit citation. Alongside Snow White, Manet's soldiers are transformed into lead soldiers resembling toys, figurines at the very bottom of a forest in flaming colors. A glamorous pink smoke comes out of their rifles like makeup powder on Snow White's face.
Manet's idea in this work, dating from 1868/1869, was to denounce scenes of war and the horror perpetrated in full view of everyone; and N.S. wanted to push this idea to the end with a staging within the limits of extravagance. By citing Manet's work, N.S. engages in the same line, having himself already worked on the image of war in the past. He pushes this idea today with a lively and sharp mind, more conscious of the pictorial elements he manipulates.

With The Clubfoot by José de Ribera it is a completely different story; still concerning history, it is a question of artistic positioning in the history of painting which mixes wonder, fascination, and identification, as is also the case for Goya and Stevenson.
A character, a boy whose age is uncertain, with a foot infirmity, shabbily dressed in brown, brandishing a cane and a paper on which one can read "Nothing". Ribera's character sits enthroned on a verdant crest in the middle, and in a slight low angle shot he is surrounded by trees and greenery.
The citation of Ribera's The Clubfoot is a resonance, a kind of reverberation that invited itself as a need to pay tribute, but not only that; it was also and above all about celebrating the masterpiece or the mastery. This is a way for the artist to rewrite his own history of painting or the painting of his own history.
The degree of mastery of The Clubfoot lies in the idea of creating beauty, the sublime, from the ugly and the infamous; this is the particularity of this work which in its time (1642) was not as eligible and intelligible as it is today.
"Nothing", nothing, there is nothing other than art to recover humanity, there is nothing other than art to navigate the chaos of the world.

Chapter II: The landscape

Around N.S.'s paintings wanders a kind of mystery; but a mystery that in no way demands to be elucidated or clarified, a mystery that takes charge of rhythmizing the images among themselves. A mystery produced by a certain visual language that makes us stagger from one image to another, from one work to another. The peacocks, the crows, the horses, the stones, the trees, take charge of keeping this mystery alive. They change places and move to create this very singular rhythm and generate a sort of highly poetic mechanics in N.S.'s painting. In this mechanics, the artist works in the genre of the landscape, without it being an exclusivity. A hyper-colored landscape, fabricated entirely from scratch, drawing from the nature of pieces like a puzzle that he re-fabricates by going through a creative process that places color at the center of his investigations. The color he perceives in nature, he revels in working it, deriving it, multiplying it, to finally spread it in an almost artificial atmosphere, like the set of a movie scene.

The forms of nature become the artist's working material, the creation tool of his visual language. Yellow, red, blue stones call for turtles with shells of the same colors, purple shrubs, clouds looking like puddles of water.
And, here, beyond the landscape as a genre of painting claiming the sentimental dimension, it is, by its very components, an aesthetic and a visual language; blue stones, a red horse, a multicolored turtle, a yellow or purple tree, trees that grow from the outside, which, from landscape to landscape, modify and model it according to where they are located. Thus the dimension of mystery continues to resound throughout the works.

Chapter III: The staging

The process of creating the pictorial image takes on, at the outset in N.S., the appearance of a game, of curious amusement and pleasure. He particularly enjoys collecting images, objects, branches, taking photos like in a treasure hunt. He only begins to create his image when he has gathered enough elements to stimulate him. This process allows the artist a latent connection between the outside world and his working surface. He sets his axes, his composition, superimposes transparent layers of colors, and draws the first elements. Little by little, meaning emerges that only the artist can grasp.
The work of light is inherent to the objects, characters, and elements he places in the scene of a painting; it is uncertain, volatile, and elusive. Light in N.S.'s work is everywhere and nowhere. Certainly, he builds a general and global luminous atmosphere, but each element emits in itself its own light, and this is what accentuates the anachronistic aspect of the narration. One can be in the dead of night and have hyper-luminescent yellow trees. One can be in broad daylight and have a dark and obstructed background. One can have a sky crossed with green, yellow, and orange and have restricted luminosity. The work of light participates in the construction of the gap between the real and the fictional.

In "Boomerang" the space of the painting is the meeting place of multicolored birds with a corpse, the place of cross-dressing of warriors with ball costumes and masks. The artist, through staging, transcends the horror and dread contained in the situation. The parrots, the warriors, the corpse, the rifles, the masks are treated with the same colorimetric intensity which gives an internal movement vibrating with the suggested movement of the birds' wings.

In the painting Mise à Mort, the work of staging complicates and blurs the relationship of the two characters face to face, revolver in hand. Still in the presence of birds, carriers of colors, the two characters wear on their heads pots with branches that welcome figurines of all kinds. The drama is compromised by the absurdity of the scene, and the play is compromised by the weapons. Fiction slips into the setting and the place. Are we indoors or outdoors? Are they alive or dead?

Chapter VI: Autofiction, self-portrait

The self-portrait has always been widely present in all of N.S.'s work. In the posture of a witness, a watcher, an artist at work, often from behind, thus associating himself with the spectator, N.S. stages himself in his paintings, among his characters with a disconcerting ease; he expresses a degree of commitment, of involvement in the image he creates and as an actor also in the scene he arranges. He proclaims himself model artist and spectator and claims to be an omnipresent creator.

The Self-portrait with flowers inaugurates this solo exhibition and sets the tone. In dark green tones, the face haloed in yellow, the artist lets flowers grow on top of his head that stretch all the way up. With a serene expression and closed eyes, the artist takes the time to look inside, his own inside, and merge with his own nature—his nature as an artist—which is like the multiple, changing, teeming, and abundant nature. This scene captures all the interest and care that the artist carries inside him in the creative process.

In the painting "Le Rescapé", the artist stages himself in the water holding a plant, looking at it fixedly, with his red horse in the middle of the painting. The statue of a lion, a tall branch, and a deserted island—the Isle of the Dead by Arnold Brooklin. This staging with the self-portrait is a first for the artist. He dives into the water and swims in the colors; he gives us the elements of an autofiction that puts him directly into the game. The artist stages himself as a survivor of the isle of the dead with a plant as his only trophy.

Autofiction is, in one way or another, an attempt to escape what makes us dead and to throw ourselves into what makes us alive.

Chapter V: On the path of Stevenson

In a dialogue with Stevenson, N.S. revives his child's soul; with the sole objective of expanding his pictorial being. A child's soul that seizes all his senses and leaves room for an absolute freedom in the configuration of scenes, in the palette, in the form, and in the expression. The artist was able to appreciate, as a child, Treasure Island and as an adult he was able to enjoy its masterful scope.

Stevenson's Treasure Island appears as the meeting place of the artist with the expansion of his expression, expressing a key moment that a child can experience when going from black and white television to color television. It is this precise moment of dazzlement, of fascination, mixed with surprise, pleasure, and exhalation in the face of this mutation from the absence of color to the abundance of it. Through the pirates, borrowed from the cartoon, or the multicolored turtle that carries the treasure map on its shell, or the parrots, the artist reiterates his child's soul and lets an absolute and limitless freedom express itself in the form, in the palette, in the configuration of scenes.

A Rubik's cube, an old man, a dog, and two yellow trees in a circle of colored stones during a nocturnal ceremony probably on the island where the treasure is found gives off such power, such vigor, by its cohesion and its dynamism, that only a child's soul can conceive it. A child's soul sharpened by adult knowledge and the consciousness of a creator.

Treasure Island is the place of the wings, the place where the artist carries his creative desire, the place of stimulation and the simulation of scenes. We are far from the artist's former characters; the metics, the primitive bald men, completely naked, dragging their tragic destinies. In Treasure Island there is no tragedy, nor comedy nor drama for that matter. All these attributes have been transcended by the power of color which diffracts and fractionates, and by the genius of the staging which extracts fiction from the real. The characters detach themselves from the movement of the scene, they know they are there for the moment of the scene and at any moment they can be elsewhere.