Soraya Abu Naba’a Gary Nader Fine Arts
Under the suggestive title of Osmosis, the Gary Nader Fine Arts gallery, located in Miamiżs Wynwood District, presented a solo show of the most recent work by painter Soraya Abu Nabaża (Melbourne, Florida, 1985), having chosen to exhibit this young artist as a celebra-tion of the National Hispanic Month in the United States.
Under the suggestive title of Osmosis, the Gary Nader Fine Arts gallery, located in Miami¿s Wynwood District, presented a solo show of the most recent work by painter Soraya Abu Naba'a (Melbourne, Florida, 1985), having chosen to exhibit this young artist as a celebra-tion of the National Hispanic Month in the United States.
Soraya Abu Naba'a tidy art has not gone unnoticed, thanks to the impetus and persistence typified by her budding career. Since an early age the artist has been interested in the many meanings implied in the coupling of art and science. From a creative stand-point, her interest in painting and fashion design delineates an interest in human physiognomy and a desire to dress up a body; in Abu Naba'a work, what we are offered is a kind of inner clothing, as though the artist were shifting interior and exterior spaces with a single stroke and we were naked with ourselves.
But if her creative endeavor is characterized by one constant, it is, without a doubt, the constant of experimentation and the cross-ing of artificial boundaries between art and science in order to, in that way, re-invent the appropriate path for the exploration of human beings, which are the ultimate object of inquiry here. The micro-cellular component comes then to the fore as the essential primary link. Fluidity and formal accomplishment denote color temperature, essential forms, and even the association and movement of elements, which determines the final composition, with the intra-cellular universe becoming cosmos.
The young Dominican-American artist, graduated in Fine Arts from the Paris American Academy, works with abstraction as an organic line. Indeed, we are presented with an organic-expressive type of abstraction that attempts to translate the inner world into pure and sufficient forms which become symbols, which in turn become motifs that gradually populate her canvases with a whimsical grid. Some-times the motif begins in the figurative realm, subjected to a process of stylization and synthesis that cuts through the superfluous and goes for the essential.
Osmosis is Abu Naba'a first solo show in American territory and represents a liberating reaction on the part of the artist against aca-demic strictures. The show takes its title from the biological process wherein molecules pass through a semi-permeable membrane. This idea of intrerconnectedness or passages between fields is greatly important to Abu Naba'a work, deeply interested in biological and relational processes.
The canvases in Osmosis seem to recreate microscopic universes whose watery nature emphasizes the notion of movement, giving the works the character of optical illusions. It is as if we were witnessing the very origin of life, where microcellular organisms connect with each other in a capricious dance. At other points, the immersion is into our own inner cartography, revealing unfathomable realms. Abu Naba'a play with the reiteration of motifs appears as an essential element, the generator of tensions, the amplifier of a tempo that guides the viewer in her journey inside the painting.
Abu Naba'a paintings are highly suggestive. Once in front of them, the viewer is submerged in a different dimension, one that facilitates an inner journey of self-recognition and self-conciliation. This sensation, inherent to the state of contemplation, is a privilege to which we rarely have access in the midst of our everyday whirlwind. At the other side of the painting, the playful sen-sation liberates us from the baggage of rationality and pushes us towards the search for hidden structures, suggested pathways, magnificent couplings.
The sensation of perpetual flux drives us thus to a new stage, moving from playful experience to a more spiritual level. The canvases now become in a kind of interior cosmogony that takes us by the hand to an exploration of our own spirituality, and soon we find ourselves interrogating the soul, seeking zones of sensibility where to perhaps identify memory, pain, significant remembrances, un-suspected oblivions. Such is the power of this inner cartography.
Abu Naba'a recourse to minimal and sufficient elements articulated through fields of form and color is the symbol of a happy co-habitation of creativity and technology, art and science: two universes interconnected in dialogic harmony in the work of Soraya Abu Naba'a.
Janet Batet