From The Deep Sea To The Cosmos

One of Lebanon's most celebrated contemporary artists, Nabil Nahas speaks to Y-JEAN MUN-DELSALLE about starfish, fractals, geometry and the infinity of the universe. Nabil Nahas has stars in his eyes, or rather starfish, to be exact

We're gazing at the Lebanese-American artist's gargantuan paintings on display in his first solo exhibition in France.

Curated by Joanna Chevalier of CMS Collection, Grounded in the Sky runs until 13 June 2023 at Chateau La Coste winery, this marvel of art and architecture encompassing over 40 major works of contemporary art on a 500 acre site set amidst an idyllic Provençal landscape lined with grapevines, cypresses, stone pines, olive trees and ancient oaks. What he calls "sea stars" pave the entire backdrop of these canvases. In fact, he's been obsessed with starfish ever since he saw thousands of them littered across a beach in front of his house in the Hamptons on Long Island in the wake of Hurricane Bob in 1991, which triggered his Fractal series. Initially mounting real starfish to his canvases instinctively, they are today composed of cast acrylic paint. His five-pointed starfish that form a polygon are the basic pattern of the golden section and Islamic geometry, which is itself derived from nature.

Nabil may be known for his three-dimensional, multilayered paintings vibrating with vivid colour - using only high-grade natural pigments like cadmium, cobalt, stainless steel, crushed mica or graphite - and texture in the form of pumice powder, suggestive of coral or biological growth, but he has never sought to imitate nature, only to mimic the way it operates, like how an oyster grows by accretion. "I'm not interested in copying what nature looks like, but in the process that nature has and replicating that," he states. "It came out of observing nature my antennas pick up things - and maybe now some things I'm doing are beginning to make sense. I'm not an intellectual when I paint at all. I don't have theories; it's all instinct."