Beasts & Beauties

Oleg Yanushesky Ikona

Metamorphoses painted by Nazir Tanbouli, is an original and powerful series of pictures dealing with the eternal subject of love between man and woman. Its black and white design underlines the straight and hard-edged reality of their relations. Both lovers easily transform, by the power of profound emotions, into strange creatures: taking on shapes of beasts and beauties, passing across forms of exotic animals and body parts, and freely mutating into one another.

The artist knowingly eliminates colour as a painting component to intensify his conception; therefore no any parallel senses dilute its sharp and uncompromising substance. This permanent, unsweetened symbiosis happens in a strictly-framed domestic universe, and the centre of this universe, its only content and its only source is a Venus, Domestic Venus. Her privilege to rule this black and white world is inviolable and absolutely invariable. Her significance is indubitable; her loud abnormal beauty is glaringly clear, and her “posh” vulgar poses organically filling up the surrealistic, mythical surroundings. The man in this world appears as a carrier of uncontrollable strength. He behaves as controversial and erratic matter, constantly changing his nature from human to ancient crocodile god, to cat - or just leaving his powerful signs at his absence.

All Tanbouli’s pictures are full of physical gravity, despite their depiction of extreme strength and fluctuating emotions. The artist successfully inserts the wild nature of passion into a gorgeous ornamental milieu, and it works in the same rhythm and for the same purpose. Each subject, every small detail, carefully and crucially placed, is crucially symbolic.

Metamorphoses is a body of work of high drama, rich in layered and multi-referential meaning, and placed into a magnificent symbolic framework. It is, in the end, an emotional manifesto, clearly declaring the rich and mutual nature of Love.

London 2007