Nabil Saouabi
«Time Sealed»

March 2019 I May 2019
La Boîte I Un lieu d’art contemporain

Seeing in cinema the possibilities of pictorial images…
Seizing a breach and freezing time in a cinematographic work, decoding and recoding it to reveal a matrix image through pictorial means. To create a space, an environment where painting and cinema contaminate each other and resonate in a timeless image, an image that thwarts time.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker or Luis Buñuel’s Les Oubliés -Los Olvidados-, characters on a spiritual quest set in imminent situations and disquieting atmospheres, function in Nabil Saouabi’s work as an infra-thin prefiguration of cinematographic moments and instants in a pictorial aesthetic. The transposition of the notions of sequence and shot, borrowed from the register of cinema, operates differently in painting.
The succession of eleven frames abolishes chronology and privileges the moment, the instant, establishing a culmination of clues and signs that make each frame/shot/painting both its own unit and part of the whole, communicating plastically with the others through light, colour or subject. The four elements – water, fire, air and earth – instrumental in Tarkovsky’s cinematic universe are thus present in the painter’s scenographies as an “underground vibration”, to use the filmmaker’s expression.
Buñuel’s blind old man on the ground is attacked and persecuted by young people and pigeons alike, under Lorca’s omnipresent gaze. It’s a shocking, gripping image, still sketched out in infra-thin lines, exaggerating the expression of the film’s image. The painting draws and digs into the memory and projects the arrow of time out of time.
The expression is mirrored in the clothes, wings and indifference of the pigeons.
Against a dark, black background that belongs as much to cinema as to painting…
The original black screen before the light, before the beginning, welcomes in the painting all the existential distress of the characters, the black as a synthesis of all colours warmly welcomes the greys that fly away with the pigeons, the greys of Lorca, the red of the young man’s jacket in the image of a toreador.
Buñuel is there, but not just through his characters, not just through the image, he is there through the spirit, through the breath, through emanation. A real obsession for the painter… overwhelmed by the genius of these filmmakers, and in a relentless desire he participates, resuscitating them, re-exposing them to the light, weaving his own discourse into the riddled weave of these registers.
Beyond cinema, Nabil Saouabi’s painting establishes encounters in other spheres. The spiritual dimension is not just in the body of the painting; it resides in the painter’s concern and desire to pursue a quest for meaning and sensation in his expression. It is his own encounter with the Stalker or with Buñuel’s blind old man…
In one scene in the film, the painter urges himself on alongside Stalker and his companions in the “Zone”, an uncertain, threatening zone… But to hell with the threat!
The halo of light surrounding the plants in the foreground and the figures in the background continue to glow with soft or radioactive light; it doesn’t matter, there’s still a way to go… Painting is the way and the encounter.
Posing, composing, arranging, redoing, questioning, arranging, deleting, reframing, mixing, the painter seeks out, pokes around, questions, explores the memory of cinema and painting.
Time is sealed with the painter’s pin.
A time that is frozen but volatile, untameable to become an aesthetic experience traversed by dimensions beyond the painting.

Myriam Aouni, ,Artist, teacher at ISBAT ,April 2019

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