The Pursuit of Truth

By Sara Raza

in the Catalouge for Lawrie Shabibi

Timo Nasseri: The Pursuit of Truth

By Sara Raza

The pursuit of ‘truth’ plays an important role in the studio practice of artist Timo Nasseri, who has created a conceptually driven project that is anchored in the study of multifaceted systems of geometric thought. Belonging to a branch of the mathematical thinking sciences, geometries have afforded the artist with the conceptual knowledge and tools to measure, record and relay art that traverse between different cultural, historical, and intellectual points of reference. Moving back and forth between ancient techniques that are rooted in Islamic and Persian art and architecture, and coupled with research into modern and contemporary Euro American art historical and philosophic tropes, Nasseri’s practice maps the confluence of abstraction and symbolism as it relates to complex codes and patterns of ‘consciousness’ which he encodes within his art. With geometry operating a central interlocutor, this essay and the three bodies of art, sculpture, ceramics and paintings, that it references from the exhibition All Borrow Their Light at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, all explore geometry as a ‘method’ for investigating complex interconnected realities.

Geometries and Origins

Taking his inspiration from traditional Islamic muqarnas (squinch) geometric designs, situated within the inner part of a dome structure, and indigenous to Persian and vernacular Islamic architecture, Nasseri’s sculptures explore muqarnas’s ideological, mathematical and geometric relationship to logic and the creation of the universe. Thus, the concept of universality resides at the core of sculptural artworks that the artist has been producing since 2004 which consist of these highly polished steel forms that focus on philosophical dimensions. These objects are primarily concerned with human-centric values which embrace a ‘common’ set of principles adhering to intellectual and spiritual ideas pertaining to Islam and its connection to absolute reality.

Striving to locate ways of being that have an affiliation with the notion of higher forms of self-discovery, for Nasseri geometries act as a bridge for ideas that metaphorically address ‘crisis in consciousness’ and function as conceptual tools for tackling polarized truths and one -dimensional forms of thinking in art and society. The three-dimensional sculptural geometric forms that Nasseri creates such as Epistrophy #8 (2017) and Radiance (2022) which are made from highly polished steel their reflective surfaces mirror fractured realities. These works derive from Nasseri’s detailed pattern drawings which can be visually understood as allegorical blueprints for human and spatial interaction, where two dimensional shapes eventually transform into a three-dimensional artistic visual vocabulary. To illustrate the poetic range of Nasseri’s visual language, I borrow from artist and philosopher Zeigam Azizov’s deconstruction of geometric culture and language which he lists as an index within his site-specific work The Origin of Geometry (2013). In this work Azizov presents twenty-six vinyl cut geometric terms that correspond with the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet and provide a parallel reading of Nasseri’s geometric oeuvre.

Acute angle
Base
Circularity
Discrete line
Empty set (a null set)
Face (a polygonal region of a surface) Grid

Hyperbola
Identity reflection
Limit
Mapping (thinking, meaning, making space)

Network
Obtuse angle
Parallel lines (Lobachevsky, pan geometry)

Quadrilateral
Reduction (Husserl, E.,The Origin of Geometry)
Surface (supplement, Derrida, J.)

Transversal
Universe (everything outside the sets)

Vanishing point
Wedge (part of a circle)

Zero-dimensional[1]

Another Alphabet

Breaking down the critical syntax that exists within Nasseri’s glazed ceramic Teardrop Vessels (2020) reveals his study of topology as a mathematical analysis into shapes, space, connections and boundaries. These works formally and visually evoke the clean and simple architectural design aesthetics that are associated with the German Modernist Bauhaus school’s functional ideology which was impactful across art, design and typography. Conceived during Covid-19’s lockdown period of isolation, this body of work can be framed as a daily visual diary or mantra that was undertaken by the artist as a means of attempting to comprehend collective grief and grievance and to reconcile with the magnitude of the disorientating economic, social and political effects brought on by the mass scale devastation caused by the global pandemic. As such these works are imbued with a quiet form of resistance and rebellion in response to the various social disparities such as class, disability, gender and race, that were compounded by the pandemic. The more tactile and fluid practice of working with the material of clay and the methodical and serene gestures created by working by hand becomes an act of repair and is reminiscent of the kind of work that was carried out by the post-war Modernist Arte Povera (poor art) avant-garde movement in Italy in the 1960s and 70s where artists were utilizing ‘poor’ materials such as earth, rope, straw, clothing and so on as a critique of capitalist forms of hyper industrialization and mechanization. In the context of the recent pandemic, Nasseri’s subversive ceramics pose questions concerning disproportionate value systems and the scarcity of financial wealth and resources which have reached a crucial tipping point and require an urgent reassessment of a flawed economic model that clearly demonstrates that the mathematics simply do not add up fairly.

Obfuscation

Rethinking geometry’s application as a visual code for privacy is explored in Nasseri’s ongoing series of paintings I am a Sky Where Spirits Live (2022) that investigate the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy’s implementation of ‘dazzle’ camouflage as a strategy to obfuscate detection during WW1 and WW2. Designed to disguise sea vessels in ‘plain sight’, the exteriors of ships and boats were painted in irregular brightly coloured geometric shapes, zigzags and stripes which created the illusion of sea currents and waves, throwing off German submarine rangefinder’s signals. The practice of ‘dazzle’ as an act of obfuscation can be described in New York University Media, Culture and Communication’s professors Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum’s text Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (2016) in which they argue:

Obfuscation is contingent, shaped by the problems we seek to address and the adversaries we hope to foil or delay, but it is characterized by simple underlying circumstance; unable to refuse or deny observation, we create many plausible, ambiguous, and misleading signals within which the information we want to conceal can be lost.[2]

From a contemporary standpoint, Nasseri’s use of dazzle’s visual lexicon can also be read as a subversive commentary and critique on the hyper surveillance and data collection. These intrusive practices are often enacted without the consent of the general public or by deliberately misleading or obscuring information with language that is unaccessible. By employing geometric designs that are intended to deliberately confuse and deflect, Nasseri’s works offer a radical approach that explores the themes of confusion and intentional interference of surveillance systems that trespass citizens’ right to digital privacy and protection. Embedded within Nasseri’s artworks are important ethical questions that revert back to geometry’s role in facilitating the ‘truth’ in a highly extractive and post-factual world.

As an artist working at the intersection of contemporary art, design and thought Timo Nasseri’s practice relies on the disentanglement of several complex paradoxical social conditions. His multifaceted  artworks reveal the analogous relationship between the non-didactic language of contemporary art and abstract geometric thinking as a methodology for revealing fractured and experimental poetic forms.

[1] Zeigam Azizov The Origin of Geometry (2013), site specific installation (dimensions variable).

[2] Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016, p 7.