Statement
Nasir Nasrallah cultivates an extraordinary imagination for the past. As a child, Nasir was influenced by the his grandfather’s house where he grew up, soaking up the contents of the antique shops that his grandfather owned back then and still owns.
He became an artist by teaching himself the basics of painting, specifically the usage of acrylic colors to paint still life. In doing so, he developed his own unique style that relies on using thick black strokes to outline his subjects. He considers himself lucky that he got to learn how to paint in his own unique way, unmarred by the restrictive approach of some teachers.
Nasir Nasrallah is a fine artist who holds a bachelor’s in telecommunication engineering and uses art, in its myriad of forms, to express himself and connect to others. His work tends to be experimental where the idea or concept comes first, driving the artistic material, and sometimes vice versa. Nasir playfully engages with the objects and the tools of his art. He uses painting, writing, journaling, planning, video installations, interactive work, letters, in addition to telecommunications systems both old and new. Despite his background in telecommunications, he created his unique thumbprint that is not at the cutting edge side of things. He doesn’t view technology as essential in his work about human connection, even if he exhibits tremendous openness to working with artists whose practice is heavily technological. Human communication is essential to the human condition as much as it is to his body of work. He considers it an opportunity to express his identity and being. He imbues drive and execution to equality through his work. In fact, connection and the assurance of its successful execution is one primary and important part of his art.
Nasir works in the Sharjah Art Foundation as a manager of creative projects that target the regional community of artists. One of his projects was Corniche, an anthology publication of sequential art produced by regional comic artists. He also dedicates some of his time to work on his online store, Luck & Fortune, where he sells small-scale artistic pieces accessible to all walks of life and not exclusively to collectors as it is usually the case.
One notable aspect of Nasir’s work is his engagement with old communication systems; he actively explores the methods and mechanisms that connect communication systems with the changing of times and geographies. As he engages art consumers through his interactive and installation work, he connects the members of his audience with a magical and invisible connection despite the physical distance between them. We therefore find his audience engaged in the same physical and intellectual actions, a fact that illustrates his commitment to bridging different times and places and reframing the concepts of materiality and being. In addition to his search in relation to old communication systems and their effect on their habitat, he regularly tests the effectiveness of these systems whether postal or audiovisual. This drives him toward building new narratives with magical worlds that reassess time and space.
Despite what we are familiar with regarding interactive approaches, Nasir’s work often takes a distinctly human approach. His audience is ultimately his friends. He holds human relations, and specifically friendship, in high regard. Here, Nasir works to build stories and tales about intangible connection that cater to wide swashes of people with different ages, genders, occupations, and origins. His audience is ultimately an essential part of his work as he traverses through their mental landscapes and reaches out to their emotions. He gives them the freedom to complete his work and choose how it ends.
Nasir relies extensively on the concept of letters in his work. He considers letters an important part of himself as a person and an artist. He takes great care in handwriting letters beautifully. He makes a point of always starting his letters with the phrase “dear friend.” Some of those letters are made with the goal of establishing correspondence while others are for public display as a work of art. Sometimes he writes them as a stream of consciousness while in other times he does so to express specific ideas. Sometimes these letters are accompanied with audible effects, olfactory elements, reactions, dreams, or whatever catches his fancy. The contents of his letters often escalate between the extraordinary and the mundane, alternating between specificity and vagueness.
All of this leads me towards emphasizing the effect of magical realism on Nasir’s work. Though sometimes not explicitly apparent in the visual sense, the influence of this school of art is undeniable on his paintings and writing that deal with surrealist narratives divorced from objective reality but seeped in his own magical, personal reality. Fantastical elements and forms often make their way into Nasir’s art whether symbolically or concretely, and in the process mimicking myths, legends, and even science fiction. Nasir paints and writes spontaneously in a way that can come across as child-like or playful, when in fact he’s just transcribing how his mind processes his reality. In his insistence in presenting the art of letter writing as a valid art form, he exhibits a clear influence of magical realism. This is further shown in his work that revitalizes old communication systems, or when he frames a piece as a letter to his future self, or when he deals with the concept of spacetime. He combines the beauty of vision and intuition to reshape the sensory reality as he focuses on its hidden or veiled aspects. He does that through a magical approach of playfulness around the dimensions of time and space.
Written in Arabic by: Ebtisam AbdulAziz
Translated to English by: Salem Al-Mansoori
Nasir Nasrallah cultivates an extraordinary imagination for the past. As a child, Nasir was influenced by the his grandfather’s house where he grew up, soaking up the contents of the antique shops that his grandfather owned back then and still owns.
He became an artist by teaching himself the basics of painting, specifically the usage of acrylic colors to paint still life. In doing so, he developed his own unique style that relies on using thick black strokes to outline his subjects. He considers himself lucky that he got to learn how to paint in his own unique way, unmarred by the restrictive approach of some teachers.
Nasir Nasrallah is a fine artist who holds a bachelor’s in telecommunication engineering and uses art, in its myriad of forms, to express himself and connect to others. His work tends to be experimental where the idea or concept comes first, driving the artistic material, and sometimes vice versa. Nasir playfully engages with the objects and the tools of his art. He uses painting, writing, journaling, planning, video installations, interactive work, letters, in addition to telecommunications systems both old and new. Despite his background in telecommunications, he created his unique thumbprint that is not at the cutting edge side of things. He doesn’t view technology as essential in his work about human connection, even if he exhibits tremendous openness to working with artists whose practice is heavily technological. Human communication is essential to the human condition as much as it is to his body of work. He considers it an opportunity to express his identity and being. He imbues drive and execution to equality through his work. In fact, connection and the assurance of its successful execution is one primary and important part of his art.
Nasir works in the Sharjah Art Foundation as a manager of creative projects that target the regional community of artists. One of his projects was Corniche, an anthology publication of sequential art produced by regional comic artists. He also dedicates some of his time to work on his online store, Luck & Fortune, where he sells small-scale artistic pieces accessible to all walks of life and not exclusively to collectors as it is usually the case.
One notable aspect of Nasir’s work is his engagement with old communication systems; he actively explores the methods and mechanisms that connect communication systems with the changing of times and geographies. As he engages art consumers through his interactive and installation work, he connects the members of his audience with a magical and invisible connection despite the physical distance between them. We therefore find his audience engaged in the same physical and intellectual actions, a fact that illustrates his commitment to bridging different times and places and reframing the concepts of materiality and being. In addition to his search in relation to old communication systems and their effect on their habitat, he regularly tests the effectiveness of these systems whether postal or audiovisual. This drives him toward building new narratives with magical worlds that reassess time and space.
Despite what we are familiar with regarding interactive approaches, Nasir’s work often takes a distinctly human approach. His audience is ultimately his friends. He holds human relations, and specifically friendship, in high regard. Here, Nasir works to build stories and tales about intangible connection that cater to wide swashes of people with different ages, genders, occupations, and origins. His audience is ultimately an essential part of his work as he traverses through their mental landscapes and reaches out to their emotions. He gives them the freedom to complete his work and choose how it ends.
Nasir relies extensively on the concept of letters in his work. He considers letters an important part of himself as a person and an artist. He takes great care in handwriting letters beautifully. He makes a point of always starting his letters with the phrase “dear friend.” Some of those letters are made with the goal of establishing correspondence while others are for public display as a work of art. Sometimes he writes them as a stream of consciousness while in other times he does so to express specific ideas. Sometimes these letters are accompanied with audible effects, olfactory elements, reactions, dreams, or whatever catches his fancy. The contents of his letters often escalate between the extraordinary and the mundane, alternating between specificity and vagueness.
All of this leads me towards emphasizing the effect of magical realism on Nasir’s work. Though sometimes not explicitly apparent in the visual sense, the influence of this school of art is undeniable on his paintings and writing that deal with surrealist narratives divorced from objective reality but seeped in his own magical, personal reality. Fantastical elements and forms often make their way into Nasir’s art whether symbolically or concretely, and in the process mimicking myths, legends, and even science fiction. Nasir paints and writes spontaneously in a way that can come across as child-like or playful, when in fact he’s just transcribing how his mind processes his reality. In his insistence in presenting the art of letter writing as a valid art form, he exhibits a clear influence of magical realism. This is further shown in his work that revitalizes old communication systems, or when he frames a piece as a letter to his future self, or when he deals with the concept of spacetime. He combines the beauty of vision and intuition to reshape the sensory reality as he focuses on its hidden or veiled aspects. He does that through a magical approach of playfulness around the dimensions of time and space.
Written in Arabic by: Ebtisam AbdulAziz
Translated to English by: Salem Al-Mansoori