Artist: Nadia Waheed

Ames Yavuz presents Noemata, a solo exhibition of paintings by Nadia Waheed. The works on view adopt an ethos of transformative attention and agency, and interface closely with the realities of the artist’s life within and beyond the studio.

Noemata marks a new evolution in the artist’s practice, known for its layering of myth, science, religion and philosophy to craft complex autobiographical meditations. Here, Waheed embraces the material possibilities and unpredictability of paint, and synthesises it with her instinct for drawing. A new tension arises on the surfaces of the works. As coined by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, “noesis” refers to the act of intentional consciousness and the subjective pole of a directed thought or perception. The figures, references, paint and line in the works, pass through this sharp lens, an artistic and personal strategy used to contend with experiences of change, fear, joy and uncertainty.

noemata, the titular work in the exhibition, inverses logics of enlightenment and conventional paths to self-discovery. A female figure holds a torch that shines a beam of darkness that reveals a swirling mass of intensities, spectres and ghosts, engulfing partial figures, including a large female pregnant nude, dwarfing the torch-bearer. A representation of Constantin Brâncuși’s sculpture Bird in Space (1928) bisects the painting, a gleaming mirror or portal between the two figures. Interrogating an aesthetics of “smoothness”, as coined by Byung-Chul Han to describe shifts in our understanding of beauty in the digital age, in which easily consumable slickness becomes the index of the sublime, Waheed insists on the mess of everyday, psychic and social life.

In cessation, a large dragonfly lands diagonally on the surface of the painting. Under this symbol of metamorphosis, ritual transformation and the afterlife, male and female figures emerge in a writhing mass, with fists closed and palms open. A surface-tension is activated under the dragonfly’s delicate feet — there is the enveloping domesticating force of social expectation, as particularly levied on women and mothers, and an opposing insistence on maintaining distinctness, identity and hope.

A set of three focused paintings make up three secrets, making reference to pivotal experiences of grief in the artist’s recent life. “They are the most fragile works here,” the artist says, “dealing with direct imagery of experiences that are at the heart of the rest of the works here. In a way, I was too delicate to negotiate the weight of paint, so to make them I would apply a layer of colour, scratch out the drawing, paint over it to edit, draw again, and repeat, working more by subtraction rather than addition.”

Noemata is a score of the artist’s decisions and attention over the past year, and the careful interpretation of the flux of emotion, imagery and life-altering experiences — made in real time. They testify to, and are left in, discomfort — made with the grainy- eyed focus after a sleepless night.