Painter Takes Layered Approach to Nature

Taking in the retrospective of work by Tahir, now at gallery one one one, can be an alternately inviting and exhausting experience. Not only does the visitor encounter a massive quantity of paintings packed onto all the available wall spaces of the gallery, but the work shivers with a kind of restless, rugged intensity.

Much as one should look at the art and not the artist, it’s hard to avoid second-guessing the artist, given his background: Tahir is an exiled Kurd, who studied art in Baghdad and in Chicago, and is now based in Los Angeles.

While there are no blatant sociopolitical themes conveyed here, we’re tempted to read into these works the effects of alienation, processed into a personal aesthetic in which there are no reliable conventions to fall back on, no safety zones.

A maker of rough-hewn, exploratory paintings, Tahir is not one to take things lightly, least of all the threat of a glibly crafted, polished end product. The subject is often nature, but also the nature of painting and its self-conscious devices.

Process is very much up front in landscapes such as “Big Plan” and “Forest,” where the elements of innocent landscape paintings have been layered and skewed into various slabs of wood, jutting out from the flat surface. In this way, two-dimensional painting has been exploded into crude three-dimensional relief.

This manner of fragmentation somewhat resembles David Hockney’s Polaroid mosaic pieces, but the effect is more unsettling here, as if the artist can’t find the serenity to make traditional landscapes. More to the point, he’s not interested in wooing the muse of conventional painting.

The clashing, gnashing elements that keep Tahir’s paintings alive are evident in his early-’80s pieces, but in more obvious ways. One almost agitprop-like image portrays a lute struck by a flaming arrow--beauty accosted by violence. More than any other piece in the show, this image could easily be interpreted as a metaphor for the travails of the Kurdish people, in search of peace and self-determination, but always on the lookout for flaming arrows.

As he has matured, Tahir has found a personal voice in the blending and blurring of abstraction and the landscape tradition. The title tells a tale with “Development”: Painted on three oddly sized rectangular panels, it depicts a potentially tranquil scene with a pond and a bird, but the rigorous brushwork and punctuating splotches for lily pads instill a sense of dissonance and drama.

The artist seems to be after the development of a spirit or personality in a work, keeping improvisation at the fore. That principle also operates in his works bearing the loaded title “In Between,” stormy scenes with caking layers of paint and tactile earth below. He sometimes mixes his paints with gesso, marble dust and other foreign substances to build up the bumpy surfaces. Gold and black horizontal bands, above and below, frame the image and put it in contextual relief.

The world is not as it seems in Tahir’s art. Landscapes are fractured or obscured, or sometimes reworked and painted over. One large, impressive untitled painting conceals as much as it reveals, with massive, unruly forms that seem uncomfortably lodged between mud and clouds. Into this murky vision, a faint line drawing of a bird appears like a song of innocence, threatened by the surrounding maelstrom.

Despite the darker aspects and angst-ridden intensity behind Tahir’s work, an air of hope, a longing for beauty, surrounds it. In a sense, Tahir’s art making is his own private song of innocence. It’s a faint tune, but a stubborn, catchy one.

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DETAILS

* WHAT: “Traveling the Abstract Landscape,” paintings by Tahir.

* WHEN: Through Saturday; gallery hours 11 a.m.- 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.

* WHERE: gallery one one one, 111 S. Dos Caminos Ave., Ventura.

* CALL: 641-0111.