Amid the romance of dreams and the bitterness of reality, lies an area of imagination often exploited by Syrian artist Nazir Ismail to express his understanding of life and art. He limits the human form to the facial, intensifying expressions through connotations and symbols he has sought after for some time until they became his own. His art is exclusive in its treatment of those symbols and their positioning on an initially enriched surface, resulting in artworks that seem effortless at first sight, and then they gradually start to mature in front of our eyes. Nazir Ismail particularly works on the face, a subject he views a state. To him it does not represent one person, as there are millions of people and to each face its own expression. The artist works on his subject as an inner state or a human condition he reveals each time differently, transforming it into a mummy that brings back time with its philosophical dimension.
Details of the flaunting shapes are absent for the sake of expression of visual effects that project out of the frames. It all starts with the fluidity and rigidity of the color black when drawing parts of a face’s border that overlay with other faces vertically or horizontally in all his artwork regardless of the paintings’ dimensions. Those faces in Ismail’s art become windows through which we exchange a dialogue with those characters, different in their levels of expression shown through their eyes. Closed eyes, open inwards, or even absent altogether, those eyes add that state of Sufism to the image along with a little drama that is emphasized even more with the faces’ exclamation and their attempt to reach out of the painting towards us from different angles. These faces appear to agree amongst themselves to portray their most extreme states of depression, and sometimes, even reaching death.
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