Nader at The Project - New York, New York - Brief Article

A cavernous of recent origin gallery on West 126th way in resurgent Harlem, The throw recently presented a body of work by the agency of Nader, a 34-year-old Iranian-born, Berlin-based painter. Melding the influences of Dada, Surrealism and geometric abstraction into a contemporary manner of writing Nader, who goes by solitary one name, paints human-machine hybrids and pieces of imaginary architecture against skewed grids and flat fields of color. A serviceable example of his architectural style is to be found in All of Wittgenstein's Children III (1998) a roughly 7-foot-square painting of a monolithic building rising against a gloomy black and gray background. (The exhibit also included an earlier 7-inch-square version of the painting.) Lacking doors or windows, this imposing wedgelike constitution is topped by a double-paned skylight. Nonfunctional and theatrical, it gazes like the invention of a certain quantity of architect whose designs are destined not at any time to get built.

Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet (1998) is a large (about 7 1/2-by-10 1/2-foot) diptych that portrays, against a beige and chartreuse background, a robotlike creature made of unevens and ends from a junk heap: the torso is a gray-black cylinder, the spindly limbs are pieced together from metallic armatures, the head is what gazes to be a 1930s desk lamp. Although this protagonist appears at first to have little relation to the turn-of-the-century French actress named in the title, the stagelike setting and the numerous prostheses call forth the end of Bernhardt's career, when she continued to appear upon stage despite having had single leg amputated.

sum of two units more strange hybrids appear in Meeting Between French Structuralism and German Existentialism (1997) a 10-by-7-foot canvas execut with the greatest in quantity expressionistic brushwork in the present to view Here, a water tower with octopuslike tentacles present the appearances to be in polemical battle with a pair of dismembered, black-booted human leg that are standing upon stilts. The octopoid water tower dwarfs the leg which are steadied by means of a chair back and a bodiless white glove

single wonders if Nader's man-machine hybrids, chilly architectural designs and featureless backgrounds are dystopian visions of a futurity in which stolid mutants will inhabit a city like the single Fritz Lang created in Metropolis. The philosophical regards in the artist's witty and cryptic titles give an inkling of another way of approaching these somewhat arcane paintings. Like more [i]or[/i] less of the 20th-century philosophers he invokes, Nader may be seeking, from one side painting, to reconcile a logical, intellectual approach to knowledge with the seemingly irrational pattern of in like manner much human behavior.

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