Flow by Tarik Berber Catalogue by DBakergallery

FLOW By Tarik Berber

6 May - 30 May 2015

Tarik Berber’s work offers a remarkable combination of two very different cultural worlds. He is of Bosniac origin. That is to say, he comes from the Muslim population of the always contested territory of Bosnia, once part of the former Yugoslavia and now independent. Bosnia has a notably rich and complex cultural tradition and Tarik is a descendant of a celebrated family of artists. As a working artist, he still maintains close ties with the milieu from which he originates. He trained, however, at the celebrated Florentine Academy, which offers perhaps the most rigorous of all trainings for painters. They grind their own colours, mix their own paints and make their own brushes, just as the apprentices did in the studios of the great Renaissance masters. There are, in addition, things that announce themselves as being entirely contemporary, a very much of our own time – for example the striking portraits of Jamaican Rastafarians that reference a ‘scene’ that is as profoundly anti-classical in spirit as anything one could imagine. These portraits nevertheless demonstrate Tarik Berber’s strengths as a draftsman. Place them in a show of high quality Old Master drawings and they would certainly hold their own.

This profound respect for tradition shows itself very clearly in Berber’s work. His paintings, with their muted colours, often have he appearance of frescos. They also demonstrate a keen interest in classical principles of design – in the relationship of the form to the edges of the space within which they have been placed. The mingling of cultural influences in Tarik Berber’s work pays eloquent tribute to the complex cultural mix to be found in his native region. On the one had, there is a strong classical element, which mat at times remind one, not so much of Renaissance paintings and frescos, as of the Ancient Roman paintings to be seen in Pompeii. On the other hand, there are influences that seem to come from the artists of the turn of the century Vienna Secession – specifically from the work of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. It is worth remembering that the culture of the Balkans, of the Bosnia-Herzegovina of today, retains impulses that originated, not in any part of Italy, but in Vienna.

The eclecticism of Tarik Berber’s work is personal, yet is at the same time symbolic of much that is happening in the visual culture of today. This culture has access to an increasingly wide range of references. Images from every region of the world and from old epochs, from Palaeolithic times to our own, are readily available to young artists, and indeed to all the rest of us provided we have access to a computer. Historical hierarchies are vanishing – art from every epoch is immediately ours, if we wish it to be so. Geographical boundaries are also tending to dissolve. Once consequence of this is that the idea of an organised ‘avant-garde’, immediately recognisable as something that is collectively ahead of the game, is becoming unfeasible. Currently attempted substitutes for genuinely new ways of seeing the world, for example an insistence on sexual shock or on raucous political activism, are only a kind of ersatz version of real innovation, and audiences are beginning to realize it. The result has been the gradual emergence of a new generation of artists, less interested in avant-garde identity, much more interested in locating the true creative self. Tarik Berber is one of those artists.

Edward Lucie-Smith

TARIK BERBER Sammy 1 Oil on Canvas 160 x 120 cm 2014 6

TARIK BERBER Sammy 2 Oil on Canvas 160 x 120 cm 2014

TARIK BERBER Sammy 3 Oil on Canvas 160 x 120 cm 2014 7

TARIK BERBER Woman in Catalina Blue Oil on Canvas 55 x 60 cm 2014

TARIK BERBER Erotica Magnifica 1 Oil on Canvas 55 x 60 cm 2014 8

TARIK BERBER Woman in English Lavender Oil on Canvas 55 x 60 cm 2014

TARIK BERBER Erotica Magnifica 2 Oil on Canvas 55 x 60 cm 2014 9

TARIK BERBER Erotica Magnifica 4 Oil on Canvas 120 x 140 cm 2015 10

TARIK BERBER Erotica Magnifica 5 Oil on Canvas 120 x 140 cm 2015 11

TARIK BERBER La Passionaria Oil on Canvas 240 x 160 cm 2013 12

TARIK BERBER Sammy (Rise of Fall) Oil on Canvas 240 x 160 cm 2013 13

TARIK BERBER Mystique 1 Oil on Canvas 160 x 240 cm 2013 14

TARIK BERBER Mystique 2 Oil on Canvas 160 x 240 cm 2013 15

TARIK BERBER Mystique 3 Oil on Canvas 160 x 240 cm 2013 16

TARIK BERBER Mystique 4 Oil on Canvas 160 x 240 cm 2013 17

TARIK BERBER Warehouse ‘Ladders’ Mixed Media 31.6 x 40.8 cm 2013 18

TARIK BERBER Warehouse ‘Chairs’ Mixed Media 38.2 x 47.1 cm 2013 19

TARIK BERBER Warehouse ‘2 Psychedelic Chairs’ Mixed Media 34.8 x 51.3 cm 2013 20

TARIK BERBER Blacks 11 Mixed Media 49.6 x 35 cm 2013 21

TARIK BERBER Blacks 7 Mixed Media 49.6 x 35 cm 2013 22

TARIK BERBER Blacks Mixed Media 49.6 x 35 cm 2013 23

TARIK BERBER Blacks 3 Mixed Media 42 x 29.6 cm 2013 24

TARIK BERBER Sammy 5 Mixed Media 33.5 x 23.5 cm 2013 TARIK BERBER Sammy 1 Mixed Media 33.5 x 23.5 cm 2013 25

TARIK BERBER “Painting is self-discovery. Every artist paints what he is.” Jackson Pollock

Tarik Berber is a highly idiosyncratic and exceptional artist, of our time and outside our time: his style is at once contemporary and redolent of another age. He has created his own unique style and, one might say, his own universe, which marks him out from any other contemporary artist. A precocious, prolific and dedicated artist, he received recognition from a very early age. Before the age of twenty-one, he had exhibitions in Italy (Empoli and Mugello); thence followed many exhibitions all over Italy, Bosnia and Croatia, which have all enjoyed outstanding critical and public success. Tarik combines a deep sensitivity with an appreciation, rare in artists today, of the history of art: his knowledge and interests range from Classical Greek and Roman to Renaissance and contemporary art. Artists are often archetypally lost in a solipsistic universe: Tarik, on the contrary, is very conscious of the world around him – as cognizant of the ethereal beauties of the Renaissance as of the cataclysms that have besieged his home country and of the grittier realities of north-east London, where he lives a good part of the year. His combination of gifts springs from the particularities of his family and cultural background and education informed as much as by serendipity as by the geopolitical, ethnic and religious specificities of the area from which his family came.

He was born into a highly cultured Bosnian family in Banja Luka, a leafy city with Roman, Slav, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian origins. Forced in the early 1990s to flee the perturbations and internecine horrors of the Bosnian War (the conflict between Bosnians and Serbs and Croatians following the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991), his family moved to Bolzano, the multicultural German/Italian-speaking capital city of South Tyrol in northern Italy, close to the borders with Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria and Slovenia. After completing high school there, he moved to Florence to study at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts. Founded in 1561, the Academy was the first official school of drawing in Europe to promote what is now termed ‘academic’ art - that is, with an emphasis on the supremacy of drawing and technical virtuosity – a skill they still prize today, but a skill hardly taught at British art schools. Florence is the place where Tarik’s imagination seems to have been ignited and where his resolve to become an artist was nurtured and fortified – and where he formed seminal friendships and ties with creative people. He may live in London now, but Tarik is very Florentine. In Italy, more than almost anywhere, the past is ever present. It is impossible to live in Florence and not be inspired by the austere spirituality of the Renaissance art and the restrained splendours of Renaissance architecture. How can one be unmoved by the almost palpable presence of Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio, Raphael, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Cellini, Leonardo...? Tarik had the enviable privilege of living a stone’s throw from the church of Santa Maria del Carmine: the Brancacci Chapel in the church is famous for its sublime early 15th century cycle of frescoes, illustrating the life of St Peter, by Masaccio, which Tarik visited innumerable times, seeing the frescoes before they were restored and lost some of their poetry. One can see so much kinship between Masaccio’s solemn characters and many figures in Tarik’s work. Tarik’s years in Florence were probably amongst the most influential on his aesthetics and style. More recently, he has divided his life between his family home in Bolzano; a family apartment in Zadar and north-east London, once a sort of ultima Thule but now a lively, bustling area, home to young creatives and artist studios.

Tarik has a strong and warm sense of family and maintains very close ties with all members of his family. In artistic terms, the two people who most inspire him are his uncle Mersad Berber (1940-2012), the best known and most respected artist of the Balkans, whose mysterious and dreamy paintings have roots in Bosnian-Herzogovinian history and whose style is a synthesis of various historic styles from the Italian Renaissance to the British Pre-Raphaelites; and his father, Omer Berber, a highly respected architect, designer and painter. Art and creativity was in his family even further back: Tarik’s grandmother was a very gifted designer of tapestries in Bosnia. Tarik’s paintings and drawings are visibly and unequivocally informed by this rich mixture of influences. He has no interest in being cutting-edge or conceptual or minimalist: the paintings and, even more, the drawings, hark back to an older age: they have more of the Old Master about them, sometimes Islamic and Moghul resonances too, but nonetheless suffused with a contemporary reverberation. I have to admit to having a strong personal preference for Tarik’s drawings, not only because Tarik is an exceptional draughtsman but also because, with drawings, one feels closer to the spontaneous act of creation. Unlike most Old Master drawings, which are usually preparatory studies for paintings, Tarik’s drawings stand as independent works in their own right, usually unrelated to final works. Artists are usually loathe to admit to any sort of influence on their work, as if they had sprung, like Athena, full armed. Tarik is not one of those. Moreover, artists are often reluctant to discuss their work, following James Joyce’s admonition (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) that the artist should produce his work and then sit back, and simply pare his fingernails. Tarik, on the contrary, is irrepressibly voluble and effervescent, when asked to discuss his work. It is a pleasure to hear Tarik talk about his own work. His ebullient, vivacious disquisitions, delivered charmingly in his highly Italianate English and in his characteristically strong Italian accent, are peppered with literary, artistic and historic allusions to Masaccio, Leonardo, Raphael, Vermeer, Velázquez, Rubens, Rimbaud, van Gogh, Matisse,

Giacometti, Modigliani, Picasso, Richter, Bacon, Kiefer.... He points to passages in his paintings, with infectious excitement. The combination of unbridled enthusiasm and erudition is almost overwhelming, but always fascinating and engaging. In terms of subject-matter, Tarik clearly has a predilection for female portraits, although he underlines that his works are not portraits – “the faces are just an excuse”, he says. Indeed, his most compelling works are those in which the element of portraiture is the least important, where the faces have an intangible, otherworldly, timeless, evanescent look – faces reminiscent more of the Florentine quattrocentro (especially faces in profile or women with downcast or closed eyes) than of today. Also, the most powerful paintings, in my view, are those portraits where the faces are not conventionally ‘beautiful’ but convey a sense of mystery or a mood, often a certain sadness or melancholy. One of the most arresting and unusual aspects of most of his drawings and paintings is the background and above all the surface texture – something which one experiences not in photographs but only when one sees his work ‘in the flesh’. Only with close-up scrutiny does one discern the complexity of his surfaces: what seems like an even, monochrome surface is in reality an ocean of hundreds of subtle variations of different pigments. One can stare at them the way Leonardo stared at dirty walls and found inspiration. Mantegna secreted zephyrs in billowing clouds, Bellini hid human faces in his rocks and the folds in Dürer’s drapery contained a camouflaged catalogue of physiognomic types: Tarik’s abstract surfaces do not hide figures, but invite the viewer to lose themselves in quiet contemplation. The surfaces of his paintings and drawings are characterized by rugosity, drips, smears, splatters, smudges, stains, blotches, blemishes – the result of fastidious mixing of pigments, painstaking erasing, rubbing and layering. They inevitably suggest the surfaces of Renaissance frescoes, which Tarik of course encountered in Florence and all over Italy. Their look today is the result of paint deterioration, ageing, dirt, decay or over-zealous restoration. One may also discern the influence of Jackson Pollock, one of Tarik’s heroes, although transformed in the crucible of Tarik’s

own imagination. Further, he might have been inspired by his uncle Mersad Berber’s paintings, which have not dissimilar surfaces. I think the stains (water, blood, tears) suggest ageing and transience. They may also suggest desecration, defacement, scarring – evocative of the sort of damage one saw during the Bosnian war and that one still sees today on the pitted, scarred walls of buildings in Bosnia. Although Tarik did not live in his homeland for very long and is more Italian than anything else, he is conscious of the long suffering the country of his birth has endured. Tarik is so keenly aware of history and its cyclic character, that it would be limiting to think that his works reference just his own country’s history: more likely, they are emblematic of all devastation and vitiation that mankind has suffered. Sometimes, the surfaces look like dried, cracked mud. Perhaps this can construed as a nod to the contemporary German artist, Anselm Kiefer, another resident of Tarik’s artistic pantheon, who so often uses this sort of surface to evoke past glories, ancient civilizations and archaeological sites he visited in Europe, the Middle East and China. They thus suggest abandonment and neglect. The ‘blemished’ surfaces may also suggest work in progress, that the viewer is being ushered in to see the artist in his studio, ‘in medias res’. His drawings, more than his paintings, often have what like coffee stains, splashes of paint and even footprints. Although often very finished, they can nonetheless retain a touch of the unfinished. The unfinished, or seemingly unfinished, has always had a special appeal in the history of art: whether it is Michelangelo’s Slaves or Mondrian’s last work or Tintoretto’s Doge Alvise Mocenigo. The background motifs to his portraits are the other important aspect of Tarik’s work. Tarik was already experimenting last summer with black-and-white or almost hallucinogenically coloured geometric designs, redolent of optical illusions and early 20th century Vorticist art. I feel personally flattered that I played a very small part in one of the stylistic innovations of Tarik’s most recent work when I gave Tarik a book on Moghul art in India. He was delighted by the varied geometric designs of the sandstone ‘jali’ (window) screens that one finds in Moghul palaces in Delhi and Rajasthan, which led him to create his own variations on such designs in some of his works.

Whilst visiting the new Islamic wing at the Louvre last year, he was also excited by the designs of the Iznik and Ottoman tiles, variations on which are also found in some of his recent work. (Geometrical and calligraphic designs are favoured in Islamic art, as figural representation is generally proscribed by Islam, at least in religious art.) Tarik also paints beautiful floral and vegetal motifs or arabesques, the sort of designs that one finds both in Islamic textiles and porcelain and also in Renaissance art (look more closely at the cloak Solomon is wearing when he meets the Queen of Sheba in Piero della Francesca’s great fresco cycle, The Legend of the True Cross, in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo). The male figure makes few appearances in Tarik’s work. One male figure is inspired by what is known as the Croatian Apoxyomenos (‘The Scraper’), the superb and extraordinarily well preserved bronze sculpture of an athlete, probably a 1st century Hellenistic copy of the 4th century Apoxyomenos by Lysippos, that was discovered in 1996 in the Adriatic Sea, not far from Zadar. Tarik spent several months in Zadar last summer, preparing some of the works for this exhibition, much of the time alone - a quiet and intense period. Although gregarious, Tarik, like most artists, feels the need for isolation and quietude. As Wordsworth said, poetry springs from “emotions recollected in tranquility”. His apartment and studio are just a few metres from the sun-dappled Adriatic Sea. He said the paintings he executed in Zadar were very different from those he painted in London, particularly in terms of lighting. Although his palette has always been very restrained, dominated by monochromes, grisailles and dun colours, the brilliant light of the Adriatic coast encouraged him to experiment with colours, which we see in some of these paintings – but even in these the colours are relatively subdued. Those who know Tarik know that he is a very ebullient celebrator of life and of the hic et nunc, but his is a sensitive soul and an intelligent mind, very conscious of the lessons of history. It is a platitude that joy is the twin brother of

sorrow: however blithesome our lives, we are, with our polyvalent communications today, more conscious than ever of the ubiquity of calamity and tragedy in the world. I think that Tarik’s paintings are in complete antithesis to his outward effervescent persona. For me, they are ultimately allegories of dilapidation and dereliction, of loss and melancholy - but presented with serenity and dignity, which are important values for Tarik. In Plato’s Phaedo (On the Soul), which contains his moving account of Socrates’ final hours, the Greek metaphysicist argues that the pre-eminent role of ‘philosophers’ (all those concerned with knowledge) should be rumination on dying and death: artists often see their noblest role as making us muse, if only unconsciously, about the big questions of life, of which death must be one. The memento mori is of course a very common leitmotiv throughout the history of art . In conclusion, what I see in Tarik’s work is not just beautiful, wonderfully executed drawings and paintings, often marrying the figurative and the geometric, not just textures of unusual complexity and allure, but, more significantly, a meditation on collective and personal memory and transience – and in his work I hear what Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity”.

TERENCE RODRIGUES Terence Rodrigues studied Classics and History of Art at the universities of Oxford, Paris and Vienna. He initially taught at Oxford then joined the Old Master Paintings department at Christieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s auction house, London. Now an independent art consultant, he also lectures on history of art and architecture mainly in Europe and the USA. He has written exhibition catalogues and articles on art (from Classical to contemporary art) for a wide range of national and international publications. He is also editor of The Fine Arts Journal.

DARREN BAKER GALLERY 81 Charlotte Street London W1T 4PP www.darrenbakergallery.co.uk 0207 580 5332 34

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