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Medium: Acrylic on board
Dimensions (H/W/D): 122 by 150 by 3 cm.
Year made: 2007
Framed: As per artist instructions
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The cat that dreamed in black and white
By Judith Palmer
“Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you?” Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Cats can’t cope with colour. Their eyes are tuned for night, where all is black, white and grey. Nearsighted, they focus their attention on the close-at-hand, rarely interested in the faraway. You could say Nazir Tanbouli’s is a cat’s-eye view of the world.
The drama in Tanbouli’s Metamorphoses plays out against a backdrop of psychedelic-patterned wallpaper, floral bedspreads and polka-dotted stockings. Everything in this riot of noisy domestic upholstery screams COLOUR. But Tanbouli has seemingly flicked the remote and screamed back at the set, begging for respite. You can almost hear the Stones playing in the background.
I see a red door and I want it painted black. No colours any more. I want them to turn black.
The monochromatic palette of the Metamorphoses paintings is unsettling. In their black-and-whiteness it’s as if the paintings are pre-emptively transforming into an illustration of themselves, and we’re watching them pupate, caught in the twilight zone of transitional states. Despite its absence, we feel a powerful colour presence straining beneath the surface. It dislocates us, suspending us in a time Before and Between.
In a colour-saturated age the use of black and white feels unnatural. It destabilises, and establishes a dynamic of estrangement. As we’ve learnt from films such as Wenders’ Wings of Desire, Soderbergh’s Kafka and Ross’s Pleasantville, a black and white viewpoint is the immediate signal of a life-less-lived. There was no turning back, after Judy Garland set us on the right road in The Wizard of Oz, when she stepped through the sepia-tinted doorway of her drab Kansas shack into the Technicolor excess of Munchkinland. Yet to peer into Tanbouli’s paintings is to find yourself in a world that defies that Kansas/Oz distinction. Here is a space where a freakshow of fantastical imaginings and down-home ordinariness co-exist in an uneasy truce. A snoring woman nods off on the sofa, oblivious to the snarling reptile padding across the lino. A man sprouts the head of a braying donkey, and his kitchen companion merely raises a polite eyebrow. Hemmed in by too-close walls and too-big personalities, the characters push against the edges of the paintings that struggle to contain them. All boundaries seem permeable and subject to collapse, as animate and inanimate objects exchange identities. The sitting room reptile adjusts to its surroundings by camouflaging its skin to match the chintzy cushion-covers. The armchair looks livelier than the catatonic woman slumped in it. This is domestic evolution in action: adapt and survive.
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Nazir Tanbouli
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2006 "Men and Insects" solo mural project. Rich & Famous Gallery, London.
2006 Solo exhibition, De Montfort Hall, Leicester.
2005 "Nazir Tanbouli" Solo exhibition, Factory-Berlin, Berlin
2005 “3 Films by Nazir Tanbouli” The Collection, Usher Gallery, Lincoln
2005 “Urban History” solo mural project. Permanent installation, City Arts Nottingham.
2003 Solo exhibition, Art Exchange...
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