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The diary of Youssef Nabil
by Simon Njami Youssef Nabil's photographs always, inevitably, take us back to another time. A past where attention to detail, old-fashioned fragrances and a manifest wish to change the nature of things and of beings is not shameful. To reproduce reality, like faithful memoirists, wasn't the objective of this era that survives in our time in Nabil's work. Our century, materialist and concrete, has banished the poetic from the realm of contemporary art. The intellectuals who rule us and determine good taste don't want to be caught out by emotion when thinking about justice and the new moral order. They are wrong. What is life without emotion? What is art without emotion? Nabil is a romantic and relishes going against the prevailing ideas of our time. He is not afraid of exploring the emotive because he is not engaged in a fruitless search for a past long gone. He knows that emotions are integral to human nature and, consequently, to all artistic projects. His images carry the same magical associations and aromas that madeleines evoked for Proust. Rather than being sentimental and crying over the past or indulging in senseless nostalgia, Nabil instead emphasises emotion as a way of observing the world with a poetry that transcends time and place. The Armenian photographers who arrived in Ethiopia at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as those who travelled to Cairo, come to mind. Black and white photography aimed to reproduce an objective reality. But for them, there existed no reality other than the world we see and feel. So they turned their backs on black and white photography's Promethean pretensions and took refuge in a universe of dreams. A universe in which colours would finally have a place of honour. Abundance, a feast for the eye, bouquets of life. Nabil follows in their footsteps. This way of viewing the world required that he undertake an apprenticeship in colouring. A real one. With a master, as is the tradition. Because expressing emotion cannot be learnt in schools or in the world of computers. Learning to express emotion is a daily task, sometimes an unrewarding one, a task that has to be mastered. It is a language that is not easily understood, a vocabulary that is not easily learnt. Initiation. The magical word. Nabil was initiated in the tradition and, in initiating himself, he didn't simply learn a technique, he gained a sensibility. A particular way of seeing the world. Because of that, he certainly understood that we all have the right, every one of us, to expand our own universe and to be the artists of our own revelations. His favourite subject is the portrait. Could it be otherwise when one has chosen to explore the mystery of humanity? What is a portrait other than the reflection of our gaze? As in Oscar Wilde's novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the loving eye that Nabil directs towards his subjects transforms and takes them into a surreal realm. They are no longer themselves but rather what he imagines them to be. We are definitely no longer within the bounds of photography. Of course, there are the actual photographic shots and, of course, there are the technicalities of printing. But for Nabil, the work of the artist starts thereafter, like a painter who transforms reality into an impressionistic image. The colours are his. They are not the reproduction of an illusory reality; rather they are imagined and invented, but also more real. Over many days, with the strokes of his brush, he slowly transforms a subject with his alchemy of colours. This is why none of his images are left untitled. Not in the sense that they are about a public persona; on the contrary, the private or intimate relationship between two people comes first. Whether they are celebrities or friends unknown to us, he depicts individuals with whom he has a special connection. This is the case with Frida Kahlo, who emerges from his dreams reincarnated into a fantasised portrait. This quest for the intimate is also clearly illustrated in his self-portraits which illuminate his art and his quest. If it is him or someone else in his images, they all partake in the same artistic pursuit. Whether he stages himself or others in his photographs, we remain in the same universe, the universe of his private diary.
Simon Njami
San Francisco, April 2007 Translated by Catherine Gadeyne |