Narrative in the work of Nazir Tanbouli
Gillian McIver

I first became acquainted with Nazir Tanbouli's work in 2001, in Egypt, where I was struck by the artist's ability to synthesise classical Egyptian art and Hellenistic art into very contemporary drawing and painting that tells us, assertively, what he thinks about the world. With works ranging from drawing and painting to mural, his is a revelatory and at times astonishing output that marries style and flair with uncompromising and often disquieting critical perspective.

As a film-maker and time based artist with a background in History, my work is rooted in examining narrative and sequential structures. My interest in Tanbouli's artistic output, then, is influenced by my appreciation for the narrative and sequential approach he takes. He creates each of his projects as something that operates between a storyboard and a conversation between artist and audience.

The first thing one notices about the artist is that he always works in a series. Each project undertaken is sequential, episodic. This works essentially as the abstract of the story, the framing: setting up the understanding that the core ideas are going to be worked out in a variety of alternative and at times contradictory ways. Each series is entirely self contained, and while the artist rarely offers any resolution to a series, there remains the essential promise that further pieces/chapters/addendum may appear at a later date, that he has not completely finished with the ideas he has been addressing.

The narrative's exposition is manifested by the strong sense of setting and character depicted. Setting might be in the detailed domestic interiors of Metamorphoses or the surreal war games seen in Alien Structures, or it might be simply in the texture of the smeared and identifiable mixture of ink, ash and raw pigment in Flying West, or it might be suggested obliquely, such as the CCTV cameras in Men and Insects or the suggestion of sarcophagi in Egyptian Songs.

The arrangement of the action both inside and outside of the frame constitutes the plot, or development or the complicating action of the narrative. Both the intrinsic action inside the frame – the composition and the ideas that the composition expresses - are also affected by what's going on outside of the frame: what is left out of the picture but might be imagined such as sound, or out-of-frame action. Inside the frame, the characters play out personal dramas. Unlike “traditional” narrative painting, the viewer does not have to “work out the story” by interpreting the expressions and actions of the characters. Tanbouli's narratives are more open-ended than that, and they continually criss-cross the line between conversation, anecdote and jeremiad.

Each series has got one or more crisis points. Maybe each picture has a crisis or maybe the series itself is sequential – with a climax or a crisis point. In Flying West, for example, the crisis is cumulative, the sheer scale of the work the steady stream of emigrants reaches a crescendo that builds pressure so as to overwhelm the audience with the sense that is a dream that is unstoppable beyond reason or argument, an impulse that will be obeyed. In Egyptian Songs of Love and Death the life cycle itself, its birth and death and questioning of the idea of afterlife, confronts both our own fears and those of the creator himself who knows that death is the great unmentionable in present society, yet he puts on the table precisely that issue. In other works, such as the different drawings in the Alexandria Book, text appears to provide the clue, yet the text is not so much narrative in itself as supporting or perhaps even counterpointing the narrative inherent in the picture itself. The text moreover is an intrinsic part of the picture, not a separate component.

While none of the works offer any neat conclusions to the questions they raise or the ideas they summon up, the effect is like that of an intense conversation with an opinionated but rational and erudite companion. A charming but headstrong conversationalist who has the skills to persuade but to genuinely win you over, not with sophistry but with sincerity. For Tanbouli's works, however light and bright without any sense of Schopenhauerian gloom, are serious in their sincerity. As the artist himself has said “I feel that there's enough people being cynical, and clinical, and I feel that I want to say things as it is, there's no place for cynicism.”

As you close this book, or walk away from the work, the coda to the story feels like “Thank you for paying a visit to the inside of the head of Nazir Tanbouli. Have a nice day.” And you feel exhilarated and slightly maddened and like you've just had a really good argument with someone and while you didn't exactly lose, you didn't win either.

London 2008