Nader Ahriman
05 Oct - 04 Dec 2010
"Transzendentale Denkfiguren"
Für. Adorno
I kiss your little hand, Madame,
And dream I kissed your lips,
you see I’m so gallant, Madame,
on such a night as this
I will never forget how my philosophy professor laughed out loud when in a seminar I summed up my interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Years later the same professor gave a talk at the gallery, he chose Seneca’s first seven letters. There we got a faint whiff of an idea which is relevant to visual art.
Nader Ahriman and I met as I finished my studies, when he together with Michel Majerus, Franz Ackermann, Stephan Jung and others were becoming famous in Berlin. While Michel challenged the German painting scene with large format pop paintings and Franz returned from his travels with the mental mappings, Nader made figurative paintings which became more cryptic, they expressed an academic mannerism and had titles such as “Aristotle on the Arctic Ocean” or “French Structuralism encounters German Existentialism” (both 1996). The cumbersome images on large format are neither wild nor are they gestural; rather they are impenetrable and mechanistic, painted at the time in quick and wide strokes. Today, Nader’s images are refined, the space is abstract. The drawing technique of cross hatching generates visual depth and increasingly dissolves the representation and imitation of nature which engenders an almost hysterical, Manneristic space. The stage floats dadaistically in the dark sobriety and metaphysical, surreal, laughing figures appear to to be near dissolving assembled costumes. The body parts are joined together by a thin thread, like pearls of geometry and utensils, they look like equipment from a laboratory, in poetic atmosphere and in loneliness. Antigone, the sister and the courageous, who like a reptile carries eggs on her back is smothered by the imposing Sci-Fi architecture. Not only the Achilles’ Heel but the whole of the lower leg and sole of the foot are supported by a fresh baguette and hover in nothingness.
For Nader the anecdote about the two lovers: Rimbaud and Verlaine who’s drug-fulled argument led Verlaine to shoot Rimbaud in the hand resulting in his imprisonment, is a passionate-dadaistic role play. It is possible to determine which visual cipher corresponds to which aspect of philosophy or event in literature. This is however unnecessary. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (or the Phenomenology of the Mind), “die Gestalt des Selbstbewusstseins” and Negation, Dualism (the opposition between thesis and antithesis) are all integral to Nader’s thinking. As Nader reads, draws and paints he delves deeper into the world of the humanities, so far that Hegelian philosophers consider him as a peer, my own philosophical excursion remains patchy. Nevertheless, there is a magical pull,
a meaning that Nader’s paintings conjure.
In the early 90’s I was given a work on paper. It was from Nader. The water colour in the background shows a woman who calmly gazes out from the picture at the viewer, on her upturned forearm lies the head of a man. Salome and John the Baptist. His eyes are shut, the head is drawn with a few black lines. Underneath it reads: “I kiss your little hand, Madame, ...” and above “Für Adorno”.
Nothing makes sense. The decapitated desires the murderer who remains silent. What has any of it to do with Adorno? For years this drawing has puzzled me. It is more than likely that I do not understand the whole context of the image, however this does not lessen my appreciaton for the piece. In fact I enjoy the rift, where nothing is clear, the contradiction in art and in life. This drawing prompted me to think upon the relationship between men and women, upon perpetrators and victims, lust and passion, presence and absence. I have often looked at the woman’s mute gaze and wondered what is violence and what is freedom.
Giti Nourbakhsc
Für. Adorno
I kiss your little hand, Madame,
And dream I kissed your lips,
you see I’m so gallant, Madame,
on such a night as this
I will never forget how my philosophy professor laughed out loud when in a seminar I summed up my interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Years later the same professor gave a talk at the gallery, he chose Seneca’s first seven letters. There we got a faint whiff of an idea which is relevant to visual art.
Nader Ahriman and I met as I finished my studies, when he together with Michel Majerus, Franz Ackermann, Stephan Jung and others were becoming famous in Berlin. While Michel challenged the German painting scene with large format pop paintings and Franz returned from his travels with the mental mappings, Nader made figurative paintings which became more cryptic, they expressed an academic mannerism and had titles such as “Aristotle on the Arctic Ocean” or “French Structuralism encounters German Existentialism” (both 1996). The cumbersome images on large format are neither wild nor are they gestural; rather they are impenetrable and mechanistic, painted at the time in quick and wide strokes. Today, Nader’s images are refined, the space is abstract. The drawing technique of cross hatching generates visual depth and increasingly dissolves the representation and imitation of nature which engenders an almost hysterical, Manneristic space. The stage floats dadaistically in the dark sobriety and metaphysical, surreal, laughing figures appear to to be near dissolving assembled costumes. The body parts are joined together by a thin thread, like pearls of geometry and utensils, they look like equipment from a laboratory, in poetic atmosphere and in loneliness. Antigone, the sister and the courageous, who like a reptile carries eggs on her back is smothered by the imposing Sci-Fi architecture. Not only the Achilles’ Heel but the whole of the lower leg and sole of the foot are supported by a fresh baguette and hover in nothingness.
For Nader the anecdote about the two lovers: Rimbaud and Verlaine who’s drug-fulled argument led Verlaine to shoot Rimbaud in the hand resulting in his imprisonment, is a passionate-dadaistic role play. It is possible to determine which visual cipher corresponds to which aspect of philosophy or event in literature. This is however unnecessary. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (or the Phenomenology of the Mind), “die Gestalt des Selbstbewusstseins” and Negation, Dualism (the opposition between thesis and antithesis) are all integral to Nader’s thinking. As Nader reads, draws and paints he delves deeper into the world of the humanities, so far that Hegelian philosophers consider him as a peer, my own philosophical excursion remains patchy. Nevertheless, there is a magical pull,
a meaning that Nader’s paintings conjure.
In the early 90’s I was given a work on paper. It was from Nader. The water colour in the background shows a woman who calmly gazes out from the picture at the viewer, on her upturned forearm lies the head of a man. Salome and John the Baptist. His eyes are shut, the head is drawn with a few black lines. Underneath it reads: “I kiss your little hand, Madame, ...” and above “Für Adorno”.
Nothing makes sense. The decapitated desires the murderer who remains silent. What has any of it to do with Adorno? For years this drawing has puzzled me. It is more than likely that I do not understand the whole context of the image, however this does not lessen my appreciaton for the piece. In fact I enjoy the rift, where nothing is clear, the contradiction in art and in life. This drawing prompted me to think upon the relationship between men and women, upon perpetrators and victims, lust and passion, presence and absence. I have often looked at the woman’s mute gaze and wondered what is violence and what is freedom.
Giti Nourbakhsc