Exhibition catalogue by Ayyam Gallery

Nihad Al Turk

Drawings on Paper

Nihad Al Turk Drawings on Paper 2 April - 28 May, 2015

Ayyam Gallery Beirut Beirut Tower, Zeitoune Street, Solidere, Beirut T: +9611374450/51 beirut@ayyamgallery.com www.ayyamgallery.com

Escaping Signs By Maymanah Farhat

Nihad Al Turk’s new series of drawings features portraits of individuals and anonymous characters that appear to float in the foreground of modest compositions. Set against bare white backdrops, his subjects are depicted as cutouts, isolated images rendered with illusions of volume and mass, resembling sculptures. At first glance, the dimensions of the paper seem to contain each figure, as the artist exaggerates their physical proportions, focusing on stout heads that rest on slender frames partially hidden from view. Although fixed in ambiguous settings, the carefully rendered edges of Al Turk’s characters define space in the absence of environmental details—a technique that allows his figures to supersede the surface of the paper as the main object of the work, thus overpowering its material primacy. Many of his unidentified protagonists are labeled The Vanquished, those defeated or conquered. All of his subjects are bruised and battered: their heads misshapen; their features buried beneath the boulder-like mounds that form foreheads, cheeks, and jaws. Deep cavities, or craters, serve as eye sockets where white slivers hold pupils the size of pellets; small and circular, they are also piercing. Within the larger concept of Al Turk’s narrative-driven paintings, the ability to see, albeit with obscured vision, has only recently surfaced in his characters. In previous works, monstrous creatures are shown without eyes, ears, or mouths, and frequently missing limbs— numb without senses but aware of their surroundings. The Hunchback, for example—a 2008 painting Al Turk created

while living in Syria—shows a deformed protagonist with a single, withered arm, his appendage-like neck stretched to its furthest limit as if reaching for an approaching bird. The small animal is also malformed and curious. The demon-like character is presumably nude, his deep brown body appearing as a solid form reminiscent of the shell of a tree trunk. The anthropomorphic figure wears a beaded necklace, the seven blue amulets of which represent the number of members in Al Turk’s immediate family. Other biographical references are made in similar compositions, forming the visual vocabulary of an ongoing tale—the story of man’s existential conflict through the experiences of the artist. Such laden symbolism links his earlier self-portraits to these latest works, although his cast of characters has grown to include recognisable men, women, and children, namely known martyrs of the Syrian conflict. Formalistic traces of his paintings emerge in the new series. Al Turk’s mythological bird, for example, is filled with brilliant shades of blue, red, or green as she engages personalities in contemplative exchanges, her seven feathers indicating the presence of the artist. In Dialogue (2015), the bird brushes against a bald man who is visibly skeptical of the creature’s affection. Refusing to turn toward the sevenwinged animal, he glances at it from the corner of his eye, cynical about the possible outcome of an exchange. The bird is nearly the size of the figure’s head but is filled with a blue and green checkerboard pattern, which distinguishes her from the world of the vanquished. The design is adapted from Al Turk’s early paintings in which the motif appears on the tablecloth of brooding still lifes. The drawing’s title references

a 2007 painting that shows his hunchbacked double under attack from the bird’s flock. A number of subsequent mixed media canvases and sculptures are similarly titled and include corresponding subject matter although the animal eventually meets a different manifestation of the artist’s stand-in. Over time, Al Turk’s self-portrait grew horns and became upright and full-bodied: a self-assured, menacing anti-hero. A 2011 composition depicts a face-off between the opposing forces of his paintings, the two sides of his own image as the personification of a struggle between good and evil. The artist’s works on paper follow a collection of paintings that demonstrates the steady transformation of his approach to figuration alongside the progression of autobiographical subject matter. Al Turk’s painting style changed within a year of his move to Lebanon in 2012. The spirit animals and inanimate objects that establish the metaphoric content of his compositions reappear in recent paintings, yet there is a noticeable difference in their forms. In Apple (2014), his amputated alter ego is depicted with a new casing. Small circular motifs cover the burnt-red skin of his twisting body, blue barnacles that replace the washes and scratches of prior works. Positioned against a bright yellow background, he balances an oversized apple, an item that signals everyday life and often serves as an allegorical linchpin in his paintings. Mirroring the rebirth of the protagonist within the enlivened setting, the apple is composed of diagonal lines of various colours and sizes. With the start of the uprising in Syria, the psychological gravity of Al Turk’s canvases began to shift, and in Beirut, took a dramatic turn. Given the artist’s preceding canvases, how might we consider his drawings?

In an artist statement accompanying the series, Al Turk explains how he embarked on his new work. As the war in Syria intensified, he made preparatory sketches for paintings that would explore its daily toll—what he describes as ‘the pressure and pain’ of witnessing its mounting devastation. After several unsuccessful trials on canvas, he decided to plot his ‘anger and passion’ using a pencil and paper. The physical proximity required in the act of drawing appealed to the artist, as it allowed him to document the tension that arises when attempting to create a pictorial representation of psychological phenomena. In order to enter the psychic spaces of wartime experience, the spatial and temporal dimensions of his immediate reality had to be surpassed. The conceptual lucidity of the artist’s works on paper is not only derived from the stylisation of his figures but also the formalism of drawing, namely the laborious process of gradually building dimension by layering lines with a ballpoint pen. For Al Turk, the reflexive expressiveness of drawing provided an entry to this intuitive domain, bringing to mind Leslie Jones’ observation that early surrealist artists favoured the medium due to the ‘limitless representational possibilities of the unconscious.’ 1By simultaneously employing multiple hatching techniques, the artist renders dense shadows that emphasise the fragile state of his subjects, and contours their faces in order to detail instances of light. Vigorous lines move across scattered highlights, an effect that suggests an unending process of disfiguration. Colour is added over areas where hatching is sparse. Large stains form as pigments seep into the paper encircling swollen eyes and covering injured hands.

Al Turk’s portraits of the war’s martyrs display the greatest degree of realism within the series. The boy whose brutal death under detention marked a turning point in the uprising is easily identified in Hamza el Khatib (2015), his pensive face resembling the school picture that was widely circulated after the details of his torture were made public. As he gestures the two-fingered victory sign in defiance of his captors, Al Turk’s bird rests on his chubby, adolescent finger. Three drawings titled Dilar, after the Kurdish fighter Arin Mirkan, who performed a suicide mission during a 2014 operation to free the northern Syrian town of Kobani from ISIL control, serve as the central images of this latest body of work. The young woman is depicted as she is represented in news and social media with personal photos that show her in army fatigues, her long hair pinned back and covered with a simple scarf, a detail that frames her face. In Al Turk’s drawings she is shown smiling and content, and accompanied by the protective creature that watches over him in his self-portraits. As the artist enters this phase of his work, he makes sure to hold onto escaping signs, chronicling his experiences in exile with the stories of his compatriots.

Leslie Jones, Drawing Surrealism. (New York and London: Prestel Publishing, 2012).

Nihad Al Turk (Syria, born 1972)

Informed by readings in literature, philosophy, and theory, many of Nihad Al Turk’s deeply psychological compositions can be read as allegorical self-portraits. Central to his work are thematic explorations of the endurance of man amidst the power struggles of good and evil—an existentialist question that has engrossed the artist for some time. Al Turk’s regular cast of imperfect creatures, mythical demons, still lifes, and botanical elements serve as the symbolic outcasts, anti-heroes, and rebels of a harrowing narrative. Recently, he has set aside the dark palette of his earlier mixed-media paintings by injecting vivid hues in the form of solid colour fields that accentuate figures. This visible sense of optimism is juxtaposed with the quieting of his protagonists through a physicality that is robust and no longer disfigured as they finally escape the weight of their world. Born in Aleppo, Syria in 1972, Nihad Al Turk lives and works in Beirut. A self-taught artist, he began drawing at a young age and pursued painting in his adolescence prior to launching his artistic career in Syria in the late 1990s. Selected solo and group exhibitions for the artist include Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz, Dubai (2014); Ayyam Gallery DIFC, Dubai (2014); Ayyam Gallery London (2014); Ayyam Gallery Beirut (2014; 2011); Ayyam Gallery Damascus (2009); the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Damascus (2009); Park Avenue Armory, New York (2008); Mark Hachem Gallery, New York (2008); Diyarbakir, Turkey (2005); and the Latakia Biennale (2003), where he was awarded the Golden Prize.

The Vanquished 2015 Ink and acrylic on paper 65 x 75 cm

The Vanquished 2015 Ink on paper 100 x 100 cm

The Vanquished 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

The Vanquished 2015 Ink on paper 100 x 100 cm

The Vanquished 2015 Ink and acrylic on paper 109 x 109 cm

Desire 2015 Ink and acrylic on paper 70 x 70 cm

Rehana I 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Rehana II 2015 Ink on paper 100 x 100 cm

Martyr of Qamishlo 2015 Ink on paper 100 x 100 cm

Singer 2015 Ink on paper 100 x 100 cm

Naao 2015 Ink on paper 100 x 100 cm

Naao 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Dialogue 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Dilar I 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Dilar II 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Dilar III 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Hamza el Khatib 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Unruly Desire 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

The Unknown 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Sara 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Enamored Fighter 2015 Ink on paper 110 x 144 cm

Ayyam Gallery Founded in Damascus in 2006, Ayyam Gallery is internationally recognised as a leading arts organisation in the Middle East, representing a diverse roster of established and emerging artists from the Arab world and Iran. Spaces in Beirut, Dubai, and London, a widely respected publishing division, and an associated non-profit arts programme have furthered the galleryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mission of promoting the dynamic art of the region.