Art Review Archives:

	V. 9 thru 10 chronological (current)
	V. 7 thru 8 chronological
	V. 5 thru 6 chronological
	V. 3 thru 4 chronological
	V. 1 thru 2 chronological
	Alphabetical Index V. 1 thru 4
	Hotlist Current 2008
	Hotlist Archive 2008
	Book Reviews

Michel Nedjar
(with Gérard Cambon, James Stauber)

September 8 - October 14, 2006

Judy A. Saslow Gallery
300 W. Superior St.
Chicago, IL 60610
tel.: 312-943-0530
hours: Tue-Sat 10a-6p
http://www.jsaslowgallery.com

There is a brute potency in Michel Nedjar's totemic drawings that belies their simplicity. For a child could do this art in terms of the figures and their execution -- the scythe-like swathe of a head, a vertical slash of nose, two luminous daubs for eyes. But this is not a child's art, any more than that the primitives from whom we derive it are children or childlike in their wisdom and their ways. Nedjar has the secret of some of the primitive tribes. In a world where modern minimalism reduces a figure to its essence, he does what ancient peoples have done, with belief and wisdom: reduces a figure to a totem, a simplification, but invested with power by its very simplicity. Like the Cycladic figures of the Eastern Mediterranean, like the squat power of the Neolithic goddess-figure nicknamed the Venus of Willendorf or the titanic heads of Easter Island, Nedjar's art finds the ancient reduction that turns a human-derived form into an icon invested with shaman-like power.

Untitled (Darius 1998) (Mixed media: 18 x 14 in.: 1998) is characteristic of the artist's work, done in earthy colors and swiftly-executed style on rough and humble brown kraft paper. The image melds a totemic appearance of multiple faces with a hypnotic, puzzle-like quality created by the overlapping of the images. The central image is a black, simplified face, which could equally be skull or mask, created by an outline filled in with black with the lighter ground left showing through as eyes and nose. Evenly matched on either side, intersecting lines form figures that are at once the cheeks of the larger face, and two birds whose heads are the eyes of the larger figure. A smaller simplified head blocks out the mouth area below. Like the passage of form from a shaman into a bird, or a dreamtime melding of animal and human, the viewer's eye slips from bird to face, unable to entirely see both at once due to the dual role played by the large circles of the eyes.

Such abstraction dates back to the dawn of humanity, and was initially related to figures having mystical and religious meaning, meant to represent something beyond the full comprehension of human experience. The ancient art of the Cyclades, 3300-2000 BC, is one example, its figures, with minimal faces, invested with a powerful simplicity that was later to influence a generation of 20th-century artists in their quest for abstraction. At the same time, the artist's rough manipulation of the media brings in an element of rawness, further suggesting artistic traditions of the ancient world, as in the Neolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, France, tentatively dated to 15,000-13,0000 BC. Such primitive imagery was concerned with fertility, propitiation, good hunting, the management of unseen forces; and as such, the figures, eyes and faces here draw in those ancient references: human yet otherworldly, the gaze bearing down in a steady, unreadable stare.

The artist's poupées ('dolls' or 'puppets') find the opposite, or rather, a reduction in a different sense. Two are included in this exhibition. There is perhaps no tribe that worships decay; but Nedjar has created their deities, icons of decomposition, whether talismanic in the sense of warding off such a fate, or prophetic as in a vanitas warning us of our eventual fate, is unknown. With his self and family touched by the grisly realities of the Holocaust, much of Nedjar's art explores this element of decay. That he employs a human-like form to do so, personalizes the message. This is not the decay of a fruit or a rose, as in the vanitas still lifes of the Dutch 17th century; this is not even the decay of an animal, like a gull found dead on the shore. The poupées reflect the dereliction that underlies human existence: the fragility of the body of that which is intelligent, thinking and self-aware, and the fact that it will decompose and rot quickly, once the spirit has fled. Masque Untitled Poupée (Cloth and mixed media: 12.6 x 7.9 x 11 in.), included in this exhibition, is a head or head-like object, part-insectile, part-human in its desiccated folds, at once repulsive and fascinating, and resonant with the mysterious, half-dangerous suggestions of spirit and power with which dolls were associated, long before they became playthings for children.

At times the welter of faces in Nedjar's works seem to be ghosts, perhaps of the Holocaust: fierce, accusatory, legion. At other times, they seem benign, even shielding. For if a totem must be propitiated, it as well offers protection. Michel Nedjar, along with Outsider artists Gérard Cambon and James Stauber, will be at Judy Saslow Gallery through October 14, 2006. A protégé of Jean Dubuffet, the initial champion of art brut ('raw', or Outsider, art) in the 1950s, Michel Nedjar is also the co-founder of L'Aracine Art Brut Museum in Paris. The artist lives and works in Paris.

--Katherine R. Lieber

Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.

Editorial Note: Selected works by Michel Nedjar are also featured in Raw Creation: Outsider Art & Beyond by John Maizels (Phaidon: Nov 1996). Raw Creation: Outsider Art & Beyond, and other books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews, may be purchased through this site's Amazon.com link or by clicking on the link above. Michel Nedjar was previously reviewed by ArtScope.net in Michel Nedjar: Retrospective, May 2002 (http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/nedjar051602.shtml).