Crazy Little Thing Called Love: Nedia Were Solo
When Nedia Were considers ‘love, connections and relationships’ as ‘the most important aspect in human life’, he is tapping our core longing in a time that has become brutally divisive, hurtful and hateful, in which reason has been vanquished, intuition obliterated, the only call heeded by the majority, trapped in their respective silos, one that defies all inclusivity. Nedia Were is not alone in his anthemic call to restore love and human connectivity in the most analogic and intimate of ways – through painting. For if social media has proved a boon, turbo-boosting the illusion that we are one and the same, if only in a cellular way, it has also proved more critical in devastating mutual human understanding and feeling.
Nedia Were is ‘exploring the boundaries that feeling can cross or reach, and it is beyond our imagination as to what it can do to our society’. In other words, love and profound human connectivity is subjunctive – a promise – which cannot be reasoned or imagined in advance. This profoundly human bond requires the most fragile of intimacies, well-nigh akin to what Henry David Thoreau called a ‘miracle’. ‘Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?’ Thoreau’s question remains vital because it asks not that we look upon another, appraise them across a representational surface plane, but that we gaze through the Other. In a contemporary world consumed by surface, this is the fundamental elixir – in which we become the others of ourselves, in which difference is wholly embraced, and divisiveness put to an end.
Ndayanza Omukhana
153 x 123 cm
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
The Kissing Couples
170 x 139 cm
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
t is the tone of Were’s paintings that generate this affect – this sense that one is in the midst of an inscrutable moment. His palette is restrained, his blocking planar – Were loves the feeling of smooth uniform surfaces, because they resist disquiet, and because they allow the central figure, or figures, in his paintings to garner our undistracted attention. But what do we see, when we look at a Were portrait? Is it the Socratic ‘examined life’? I think not. Because what Were is emphatically disinterested in is the Ego, the assumption that one can truly ‘know’ oneself. This Socratic ideal, which resurfaces in the Enlightenment in the belief systems of Kant (know thyself) and Descartes (I think; therefore I am), are anathema to Were, for whom it is the miraculous wonder of life, the accidental intimacies, the subtle revelations, which are generated in a beatific and quiet state, that matters far more. It is ‘the boundaries that feelings can cross and reach’ that distinguishes the energy field of his paintings.
Given this historical moment, in which Black Portraiture is proving a defining focus, Nedia Were’s task is not to be its trumpeter or clarion caller, but, from within the shades, a more quiet and mysteriously veiled terrain, to allow for a greater introspection and reflection. Black Art, after all, is not a genre, or a commodity, but an infinitely complex and varied expression of a time of radical revision. Throughout Western art history, prior to this moment, the black body has been largely erased, or shunted to the side-lines, as a bit-player or extra in a narrative in which white mythology and power has assumed centre-stage. What Were’s paintings remind us of, subtly, is precisely this gloaming and overcast condition of black life, its residual and partial and fleeting presence. His paintings are a veiled commentary on the excision of black life, and, more potently, its new-found presence and presencing. Because, of course, Nedia Were does not objectify his subjects. Instead, he allows them an enigmatic zone, a ‘zone’ which Frantz Fanon described as ‘occult’ and ‘unstable’, a zone, impossible to triangulate, where ‘the people dwell’.
My point? That Nedia Were’s anthem to love and human connectivity is as virtual as it is historical. It places the black body at the centre of two realms in which it has, in the Western world, been excluded, which he then subtly counters with his own mysteriously deft and even occult corrective.
-Ashraf Jamal
Ready To Die For You
173 x 153 cm
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
The Two Lovers
170 x 139 cm
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
In Love With Myself
144 x 170 cm
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
horeau’s vision, which Were supports, is also profoundly expressed by Martin Buber who in I and Thou – a perfect summation of Were’s vision – declares, ‘I imagine to myself what another man is at this very moment wishing, feeling, perceiving, thinking, and not as a detached content but in his very reality, that is, as a living process in this man…. The innermost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between one and the other, between men’. After Were, Buber has championed community and honesty as humanity’s ‘pillars‘, and its very foundation.
What Were, Thoreau, and Buber jointly advocate is a greater depth of being. As to how this is achieved in-and-through Were’s paintings is the next port of call. Given that we are, after TS Eliot, ‘distracted by distraction’, and thus incapable of wholly focussing our attention, the question remains – What are we seeing, absorbing, knowing, feeling? Anything at all? How, in other words, do we still ourselves sufficiently in order to embrace the Other, be it a person or a painting? In Were’s case, this is achieved by adopting a particular time of day – say dawn or dusk – when all is tremulously suspended, hovering fleetingly in a time out of time. If this is indeed the case, as I believe it to be, it is because Were’s paintings refuse to be immediately seen, because they are enigmatic, and resistant to the viewer’s ability to contain what is seen. This is because, after Thoreau, he values the ‘miracle’ of being able to see ‘through’ a given state or condition. This is why his paintings assume a suspended and untimely quality, why they are so moody, so still and contemplative, yet mysterious and rune-like.
The Black Wedding Dress
170 x 144 cm
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
The Boy With The Cats
144 x 170 cm
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas