S27 | Spotlight
Nabil Nahas was unusual amongst young Lebanese painters of the late 1960s and early 1970s, travelling to the United States in 1968 for his training rather than Paris. The early experiences he had there, especially his time at Yale studying for his MFA at the start of the 1970s informed much of his subsequent work. There Nahas encountered many of the most prominent contemporary artists of the time, but it was Al Held who was teaching at Yale University at the time that became Nahas’s mentor.
Emblematic of Nahas’ period of geometric abstraction, which was to continue into the early 1980s, these works show the scale and ambition of Nahas at an early stage in his career and predate by four years those shown in his first gallery solo exhibition at Robert Miller in 1978. Presented alongside two striking abstract paintings from 1978 — the same year and series as one currently on view at Tate Modern — the works show both the influence of Al Held as well as the brutalist architecture of Paul Rudolph's masterpiece, the Yale School of Architecture. They also demonstrate how, as a student, Nahas moved beyond the relative clarity of the older painter to explore the complexities of Islamic geometry.
In America at that time, these paintings must have appeared quite radical: the critic Clement Greenburg’s theories of painting were still current orthodoxy - that progressive painting was about emphasis on two dimensionality of the surface. Nahas, already making drawings of geometric patterns in the late 1960s and 1970s, was encouraged by Al Held, who at that time was filling his canvases with rings, cubes and three-dimensional discs. However, there was always a difference: whilst in Held’s work complexity comes from the incompatible perspectives his simple forms imply, Nahas was looking towards Islamic art and its tessellated ceramics patterns, seeking to expand these into a three dimensional set-up like honeycomb. The overlapping geometric systems of Nahas’ paintings, with their emphasis on optical mixture and the dematerialization of the surface, diverge markedly from the contemporary works of both Held and Stella. Nahas’ use of geometry was less recognizable, as the abstractions of these paintings do not feel so much like geometry as decorative motifs from the pantheon of Islamic art imbued with an eerie luminosity.
With their linear structures and yellow ground, which Nahas used because he was searching not for physicality but intangible luminosity, his work caught the attention of the Harry Wasserman, Professor in the Chemistry Department and himself a keen amateur painter, and the panels were placed in the neo-Gothic lobby of Sterling Lab, the Chemistry Department at Yale University. Nahas says of the mechanical effect of these paintings “I didn’t want to feel the paint”. The artist’s hand was not to show.
These works are the forerunners of several of those in important international institutions, including those in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Barjeel Art Foundation. A study on paper for these works is in the collection of the British Museum.
