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From Timo Nasseri’s “Cosmic Alphabet” project
Conceptual work precedes Nasiri’s sculptural practice. It is a continuous reading and responsibility of the historical visual vocabulary and its origin, instead of an embodiment of the artist’s feelings. What appears to us as abstract shapes and color-based engineering panels and linear iterations are simply the result of one of the many possibilities in the course of his work.
In the “universal alphabet”, the aesthetic and historical layers in these works are numerous, between artistic, military, natural, anthropological and colonial history. The beginning was with images of military barges from the First World War, which were found on the Internet by the Nasserists. The barges were not like any of the usual marine mechanisms, but abstract lines and shapes were drawn on their outer structure, which had the function of camouflaging and preventing the armies of enemies from seeing the direction of the ship, since it is difficult to distinguish whether they are approaching or moving away. Called Razzle-Dazzle, this technique is represented by colorful, bitter lines used by the British and American armies to confront the Germans.
From these images, the artist searches for the origin of this camouflage, its artistic and natural patterns. The complex narratives that surround it gradually unfold, which in one way or another turns us into the multiple, sometimes conflicting, ways of writing a story, and artistic history in particular. From one hypothesis to the next, Nasseri travels, without avoiding many questions: How to arrive at a universal language? What are their vocabulary and forms? How do you write history? The artist does not adopt any of the answers that fail, but rather makes abstract visual suggestions that contain all these layers, within the sculptural and sculptural work that led to the birth of his artistic alphabet, which is inspired by the Razzle Dazzle technique. But this camouflage technique does not stop at its formal and external incarnation. It converges with various artistic methods such as empiricism and cubism, while being associated with more than one name. Initially attributed to British artist Norman Wilkinson, and British zoologist John Graham Kerr, whose research indicates he was the first to discover these camouflages, and was inspired by the methods of some defensive animals and insects to protect themselves in the wild.
However, Kiir’s rights were lost before Wilkinson, although the dispute between them continued until after the war years. As for the third story, it refers to the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who says that once he saw these battleships from the port of Marseille, he shouted: “They stole my art”. But wasn’t Pablo Picasso accused of stealing the works of other artists and of being influenced by tribal arts and other peoples such as African masks? This ramification led Nasseri on a search in African art to discover an engineering dimension in the drawings that some of the peoples and tribes of the brown continent followed to camouflage their bodies and faces. The artist found the same styles in the masks of the ancient peoples as the Japanese masks of Kabuki and in Indonesia and the traditional arts of the Native American peoples. While the use of these patterns and forms among ancient peoples as talismans and talismans for luck and protection, European colonialism dispelled these traditions with its religious teachings imposed by violence in Africa and on the American continent in particular, which it subsequently led to the loss of the rituals and practices of these peoples. Between the tribal system, magic, and subsequent human wars and colonialism, the sculptural work ranged from Timo Nasseri’s cosmic alphabet. Thus, he stripped the patterns of the first ships and transferred them to paintings of large sizes, to produce from them figures of the characteristics of different beings.
In Nasseri’s paintings, the characteristics of his forms are lost among insects, tribal totems, and warships. Many contemporary demons and deities inhabit these contemporary sculptures, from which Nasiris cut large monuments that restore the shape of the tribes’ first totems. The artist also dissected these complex geometric patterns, breaking them down into the first elements that make up universal painting.
Thus he came to more than 700 abstract forms that he recomposed and sculpted in metal, suggesting them as a mysterious cosmic alphabet, suitable for all ages and accompanying human concerns at many stages in the history of human development. Perhaps this is what we need most in the anxious times facing the world now.
Sfeir Zumler Gallery website
Ibn Maqla: all the letters in all the stars
Timo Nasseri’s first work on literacy and how to write it is not a “universal alphabet”. Although he could not read Arabic, he devoted a long project (culminating in his exhibition “All Letters to All Stars” (2017)) to test the Abbasid calligrapher Ibn Muqla (885-940AD). Nasseri starts with the story of Ibn Muqla and his attempt to add four new letters to the Arabic language, before being accused of desecrating the language of the Koran and punished by cutting off his right hand and tongue and leaving him to die in prison. This is how the destiny of man ended, and this is how its four letters that suggest additions to the Arabic language have also disappeared so that they can be translated and compensated by the voices that are spoken and not written. Aided by Ibn Muqla’s extensive understanding of calligraphy as a tool for drawing the limits of space, Nasseri attempted to find the four letter forms that Ibn Muqla was unable to complete. He dedicated his entire project to solving this mystery, since he resorted to a digital program to locate the stars in the sky during the year 934 AD, that is, during the life of Ibn Muqla. Based on the location of the stars, Nasseri followed Ibn Muqla’s geometry in Arabic calligraphy, and performed mathematical operations that eventually led to four new letters. The visual result was sculptures made of wood and steel surrounded by circles such as the embodiment of the Arabs’ astrophilic astral machine, in addition to the five points that Ibn Maqla was using as a way to measure the length of the Arabic letters. Of course, he did not conclude that Ibn Muqla would have come had he been allowed to survive. But Nasiri’s contribution are merely aesthetic suggestions that arise from basic questions about the origin of the letters, their forms and how to create them. He also remembers the complex aesthetic and arithmetic rules that Arabic calligraphy treasured, represented by one of his greatest experiences according to Ibn Muqla. In his sculptural work, which is similar to the journey of solving the mysterious aesthetic puzzles of history, Nasseri has always used Islamic references, his engineering patterns, especially the motifs of Persian architecture and mosques.
