text_arebours_ing - barbara nahmad

A REBOURS
by Alain Elkan

Why did Barbara Nahmad feel the need to portrait the faces of some remarkable protagonists of our late past, if nowadays we are living in a world of photographic images picturing such faces in so many different situations, that these faces are known to everybody? In the second half of the 20th century Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente and Lucian Freud-just to mention some artists - expressed themselves portraying famous characters as in the most ancient painting tradition. That was probably because real artists feel the need to compare to models, to personally interpret them therefore letting their style be revealed, using already visited models in order to show differences.
Let's mention, for example, an eclectic artist such as Jean Cocteau who, being friend of many other artists and being his attitude similar to the one of Narcissus, was portrayed throughout a short period by Picasso, Modigliani and Kisling and later on pictured by Man Ray and Brassai. Cocteau, always looking the same, was portrayed by each artist in a very recognizable way.
Similar to this, Barbara Nahmad is testing herself, her art, her evident style, her portraits - where mouths play a key role - in order to let us understand the personality, the smile, the experience of a famous character everybody knows, viewing the portrait through a style, a look, a line only belonging to her.
It is amazing to go through a series of portraits displayed next to each other describing faces and periods in which some characters, Barbara never met, had been living.

BARBARA NAHMAD: THE INNER PORTRAIT
by Arturo Schwarz

For Sanskrit poetry the identification with models is absolutely necessary in case you want to faithfully mirror them. And Plotinus’s remark states: “the eyes could never see the sun if they did not contain the sun already”. Barbara Nahmad’s ability to perceive the essence of her models derives from her ability to identify herself with them. It is obvious that this identification is more easily achieved when models belong to the artist’s same gender. This is the reason why her feminine portraits have, such a poetic and emotional weight. Her overwhelming presence – I would say even complicity – is able to let the inner transfer of models to be perceived even in case subjects are men.

The XVII century theosophist, Jacob Böhme, maintained: “The outer visible world is an image of the spiritual inner world”. Barbara Nahmad’s portraits shed such an intense aura of truth because the artist focuses on foreground set faces – better reflecting her characters’ psychology – whereas bodies, not revealing so much, are practically denied. Our painter is able to interpret and understand one-person nature, also because she is able to catch the light in people’s eyes - and as everybody knows the look, is the most truthful mirror of our soul. Besides this, she is also able to introduce her unique way to transform, by using the light given by colours, all the marks left on people’s faces by the shadows of life.

It is also necessary to remember that Barbara Nahmad’d portraits are the results of a creative reaction caused by the vision of her characters together with a (visual and mental) consideration of them. These portraits show a detail that reminds us of the consideration made by Duchamp concerning Readymade. Barbara’s paintings are not made out of a direct vision of models: it is a second-degree type of vision. As a matter of fact Barbara does nor portray people themselves, but their Readymade image, popular in papers. In her case, thus, the relationship with medias is fundamental. Moreover, as her portraits get their inspiration from papers, there is something more than what we can find in often rough and even “stolen” photos. She proposes not only characters with human qualities but also the way people identifies with them recognizing them through medias. In this context the format of the painting is fundamental, it must have wide dimensions in order to recall the place for public and individual memories. Who is the teenager that nowadays does not have in his own bedroom, a poster showing his idol to love?

Barbara sees painting as a mix of presence, subjects and up to date events. It should be able to absorb  – still preserving painting tradition, too often completely neglected nowadays – the new technological media that actually seem to be the new reality. Her portraits of public people still remain the portraits of individuals, i.e. a representation trying to disclose the human and empty nature of appearance. Barbara shows and identifies, in these characters’ personality, one of the reasons why they are still fascinating and why people still identify themselves with the heroes they will eventually embody. Barbara keeps on collecting magazines such as Life, Epoca or Paris Match, because these represent the sources of her images, filtered by a reporter’s oriented attitude that fixed them in order to respond to the needs of the editing market.  

All the characters Barbara chooses for her portraits represent the positive heroes that our age deserves. They carry the burden of their time and, sometimes, the tragedy of their destiny. They somehow represent an open mind attitude, a moral quality and modernity able to defeat the unrestrained consumerism of our society. The Greek word aletheia generally translated as “truth”, has rather the meaning of “unveil” (a-letheia: take off the veil). Nahmad’s portraits are truthful also because they are able to disclose, together with the inner side of people, a glimpse of the eternity of existence.

FANTASTIC MOANA
by Maurizio Sciaccaluga

Edson Arantes do Nascimento is known by everybody as Pelè and O rei. The Brazilians see him as the Pan de Azucar, the blessing Christ, samba, and the Carnival in Rio. The Italians see him as their biggest defeat, the matador, the unforgettable souvenir of four goals received. Even if Santos – a myth team of south American football, similar to our ‘Grande Torino’, to Genoa football team founded by the English, to the pre-war period Pro Vercelli team –  is still living with its own dignity – its real start and death was decided by him. In Barbara Nahmad’s big portrait, he is slyly smiling, being consciously aware that he is the strongest, the invincible, and on his perpetually tanned face on a violet background there is the outstanding happiness of a man who, despite his origins, was born as a winner. Such picture shows the absurd pleasure of football, a social revenge, the amusement of the show, the look of those who know, that actually life is only a game. Violet is chosen for it is the forbidden colour in theatres; the most hated for those in the show business, therefore the most felt, the most feared, the most experienced.
Ernesto Guevara - the Hero of guerrillas - named by everybody ‘el Che’. For many people he stands as the free and sound spirit of South America, he is revolution itself, he is the Commander, he is a trip throughout a continent riding his Norton 500 motorbike, ironically baptized as La poderosa. “Should we have children, let’s hope they’ll be like ‘el Che”, somebody said. In Barbara Nahmad’s portraits he’s constantly hiding a doubt behind an apparent self-confidence and a bad premonition backing his certainties about revolution. Such painting contains beauty, strength, justice, the will of a challenging destiny that is stronger than tradition. The character’s bearded face on a red background reminds everybody that, in reality, winning and losing are only details, the same side of the same coin. Red symbolizes the colour of politically oriented red people, their flag, their red (Russian) revolution.
Moana Pozzi, known by some people as Fantastica Moana, is for everybody: Moana. She is the queen of made in Italy porno movies, but also the woman that was brought onto the catwalk by a stylist in 1993, who maintained that: “Women want to move like Moana, not like top models”. She stands as an undoubtedly profane but partially sacred love, for that kind of shining beauty, that belief, that unique purity in the history of hard-core movies. Her most famous statement was: “I never provoked anybody, I’m only doing my job”. In Barbara Nahmad’s big portrait she looks very confident, beautiful, never vulgar. Such painting tells the story of the face of a Catholic girl able to oppose herself to everything had been previously planned, prepared and designed for her. Her face is bright, smiling, and the red background means passion, blood pulsing in her veins. Red symbolizes transgression, fire, hell.

The aim is to portrait history, to immortalize faces and expressions that conditioned, led, marked and that radically changed it. To capture features that featured – please excuse this play on words – the events of our recent past. And, in order to get rid of backgrounds, replace the real world of circumstances with a monochrome detached enamel painting style – able sometimes to enhance the meaning of life and mission, such as the red colour in ‘el Che’ as well as in Mao. Indifferently, it is also able, to violently clash with the deep sense of an existence, such as in Kissinger’s acid green colour or else in Indira Gandhi’s orange colour. That way the audience is obliged to look for and go through the sense of events only using face wrinkles, body marks, fake or spontaneous smiles, contrite or funny grimaces. This is what Barbara Nahmad does in her very recent group of works, and this is what painting does creating a series of mnemonic flash-backs apt to live and reinterpret events and characters belonging to some decades ago. Such painting is also able to transform the audience into lie detectors finally helping to perceive true tellers and liars, right and wrong, wise and dangerous people.For our latest generations – people aged twenty and thirty grown up and fed by the boom of the eighties, living among ‘paninari’ and ‘pentapartito’ (five party government), among yuppies and first telenovelas (soap operas), influenced by the first private TV channels and the first PC that would have modified ways and times of image use and therefore contemporary myths creation and death – Marilyn Monroe, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Mao Tse Tung, Elvis Presley, Grace Kelly, JFK, Golda Meir, Jacqueline Kennedy are reference icons, symbols just lived as a reflex inherited by parents or by older brothers. They are faded, misted up and badly focused posters and pictures. Even Alberto Sordi and Moana Pozzi, Pelè and Gianni Agnelli – survived more than others to their own myths and closer to young people for they are (still) active in our times – are only names to which stories and actions, victories and defeats, events and consistent parts of our history are difficultly associated. But for that generation of never grown up boys, born in between mid fifties and the end of the following decade, between the moment in which the Irish clan got the American power and the first step on the moon, between the trading successes of ‘Cinquecento’ car and the revolutionary messages of  TV ‘Carosello’, those names and those faces are real History. As a matter of fact they stand as crucial moments of their own lives, they represent dreams and disillusionments, rage and the desire of peace, passion and boredom, desire and love, commitment and disengagement, politics and social sense felt in a complete and shaking way for the very first time. And these are those who, in Nahmad’s pictures, can meet their past, can analyze themselves trying to understand who they are even after several years and decades. Actually, thanks to a strange exercise of physiognomic, they can try to understand, motivate, justify – or maybe, as often happens or has already happened, deny  – past impulses and choices, beliefs and slogans of their youth. The artist freezes those renowned faces, in renowned poses. He strikes the very foreground by using a very brilliant and shining enamel background so as to block, by a black and grey background, by strong brush strokes and by carefully refined details, some features of that character’s nature, of that historical period, of all meanings and passions that this face can resume and exemplify. In white and ash colour marks of the skin, in wrinkles, in eye and lip-shapes are rapidly flowing all the souvenirs of those who lived by those names,  practised them and mixed with them (even if apparently) in those times when television was only two TV black and white channels, when educational programmes started at 5.00 in the afternoon and TV news were not an instrument of political persuasion but an indispensable appointment with the world. Barbara Nahmad gets a paradoxical appointment with history, similar to Zelig by Woody Allen (not incidentally among her characters) or to Forrest Gump by Robert Zemeckis. She sets up an improbable and impossible meeting between the audience and the creator of world’s events. If Leonard Zelig gets to the stage of the Pope or in an assembly next to the Fuehrer, if Forrest Gump shows his bottom to the President of the United States, those who get involved beholding the artist paintings could find themselves dealing with their first love (men’s favourite blonde), with the champion they would have liked to be (O rei), with their revolutionary instinct felt for long but never thoroughly fulfilled (the hero of guerrillas).