Ali Matar from Montreal : Nabil El-bkaili.. The Art of Making the Unfamiliar Familiar and The Familiar Unfamiliar

Ali Matar
Lebanese-Canadian poet and screenwriter lives in Montreal

Every painting, for Jacques Lacan, is “un piège à regard” [a trap for the gaze], and in this sense, the beholder becomes both aesthetically embodied and actively empowered by taking on the position of being voyeuristic vis-à-vis the visual signs and symbols contained in the work of art. Lacan’s radical and provocative statement compels us to explicitly address the question of how should we understand the relation between the painting called “desire” by Nabil El-bkaili and the real, flesh and blood beholder outside the canvas’s rectangular frame?

Certainly, the first instinctive reaction to El-bkaili’s Digital painting — which explodes all over/within the mind’s eye of the beholder — parachutes him or her into a new sphere of ideas, where he or she affronts all of the prejudices and preconceptions and discovers through the complex, multilayered processes of meaning-making and interpretation that the familiar is embedded in the unfamiliar, and vice versa. This uncanny double state constructs and conveys itself via sensory-affective experience of encountering Baqili’s painting—which, following the Freudian psychoanalytic theory of aesthetic perception, becomes observable and recognizable almost immediately.

As a direct consequence, the ‘beholder,’ or rather the ‘gazer,’ falls hostage to the sensory-somatic engagement with the various components of this painting, whereby the artistic force of Baqili acts like a swayable pendulum, swinging between ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming.’ That is, between a final compositional drawing and an ongoing creative work in progress, between the physical and the psychological eye of the beholder and the content and context of the painting, resembling the evolution of life itself – Baqili’s painting is unceasingly being contrived, in the here and now.

It is this here-and-now dimension that rescues El-bkaili’s painting from its stagnation, hence catapulting it from a state of artistic inertia, giving it a powerful momentum, thus transposing it to a novel representational form of painting shaped by vivid, vital, and vibrant colors, by which the invisible becomes visible, the hidden becomes unhidden, the unknown becomes known, the extraordinary becomes ordinary, the absent becomes present, the immaterial becomes material, and the unfamiliar becomes familiar. A kind of immersive mediation that blurs the boundaries between the cognitive-conative, sensual-somatic, emotive-expressive faculties.

Due to this composite interplay, which revolves around El-bkaili’s nude goddesses, the beholder finds her- or himself momentarily arriving at a cubist geometric formation par excellence by traversing an uncharted terrain of visual language that is dominated by three vocabularies—passion, impulse, and desire. Taken together, these elements constitute a fiery triangle of intensity that firmly fixturized itself into El-bkaili’s painted frame without being conditioned by that fixidity.

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المألوف في حضن اللامألوف.
يمكن في الحال استدراك ذلك في لوحات «رغبة» للفنان نبيل البقيلي. الناظر إليها ، والأحرى المحدق فيها، مختطف
إلى منطقة حسية استثنائية،
يعلق البقيلي التشكيل بين إنجازه الفعلي وبين إمكانية واحتمالات إنجازه المتواصلة بين عين الناظر واللوحة
بحيث تبدو المادة قيد التشكيل الآن.
هذا الآن ما يخطف اللوحة بدورها من المنطقة الجامدة إلى المنطقة النقيضة بألوانها الجريئة والصارخة حيث يمتزج الحسي بالشعوري، المألوف باللامألوف، وحيث يمكن أن نصل مع عاريات البقيلي إلى لحظة تكعيبية تتكون أساسا بعبورها في لغة الشهوة النارية وتثبت داخل الكادر دون أن يحتويها الثبات.