The Collage of Memory | Visual Artist Nabil El Jaouhari

Nabil El Jaouhari grew up in a village outside of Beirut, Lebanon. Even amid post-war cycles of sectarian violence, Nabil followed a path of artistic expression. His fine art studies eventually led him to the United States. Since moving to Asheville, about eight years ago, he has regularly shown at Mark Bettis Gallery in the River Arts District. In today's conversation, we learn about his life in Lebanon, how moving to the U.S. affected his art and his explorations of memory through visual collage.

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Transcript

Matt Peiken: Describe your upbringing in Lebanon.

Nabil El Jaouhari: I'm like a war child, but then grew up in post war Beirut.

Yeah, I don't think Beirut is actually what people imagine it to be here. It's actually a very alive, metropolitan and cultural hub for the Arab world. So there's a lot of art, theater Many universities and a lot of beautiful architecture. The entire city and the entire country is by the seashore. And yeah, it's probably also the best food you'll ever have. 

Matt Peiken: Really? So you were a post war child in a large family. Your father was a furniture maker. So there was a sense of physical craft, visual craft there. You mentioned how Beirut is such a cultural hub, were the arts everpresent in your upbringing?

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yeah, I mean not the way that the West kind of thinks of art, not like going to, I mean later in life of course, in mid 90s with Ashkal Alwan, which is a contemporary art organization in Beirut and Beirut Art Center and saw a lot of contemporary art, but as a younger person, I probably just saw my dad building furniture and worked in his workshop in Beirut during summertime. But yeah, I was encouraged to embrace my artistic side. Because of my dad's craft, and so I was always given money or support to buy paint and canvas and all of that, even before I went to college or university. 

Matt Peiken: You mentioned how it's such a cultural Mecca there. Did you go to art school in Beirut? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: I did. Yeah. I went to Lebanese university, which follows the protocol or the the French academy it's, the program is billed in, Parts of the French Academy, so it's no credits, no semesters.

It's like a four year, nine to five kind of a thing, five days a week. You have to go out to paint in nature every Friday, rain or shine. You have to learn all aspects of art, like from mosaics, modern mosaics to printmaking in all different forms of it to painting to drawing. It's a very intensive program. 

Matt Peiken: You mentioned all these different disciplines that you were schooled in. You didn't mention about how to think as an artist. And I would wonder, in the Middle East, whereas in certain art schools in the West, you can think about mining the inner soul and how to bring that out, even if the subject matter might be very controversial.

Can the subject matter, or did they ever talk about subject matter? You mentioned you had to go out in nature, rain or shine. But were you encouraged to explore risky or provocative topics in art school? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yes and no. Of course you're told not to be spoonfeeding in your approach. Being from there, if you wanna do a painting about war, it's not encouraged that you would, do something like you know, corpses and blood.

Things that are, obvious and, but no, I think that came later when I went to grad school, this idea of the focus. Yes, of course, there was like art history classes and kind of aesthetics classes and theory classes, but you studied so many different disciplines. My project, for example, was about Polaroids.

So I took Polaroids that my dad has taken back During the Civil War, but they're of the family and he's a terrible photographer. There wasn't people posing for the pictures, it was just like, people eating on a table, or our family eating, or having a barbecue, or, and there's something always fascinating about these photographs for me, because it going back to your early question about what the West thinks of Lebanon, or the war, or all of that, you gotta remember that life goes on when when war happens.

War is just a backdrop. And life goes on. We went to school. We went to, where people got married, people had kids, people had, birthdays and parties and New Year's Eve. And there was war, but, life goes on in a way. 

Matt Peiken: What were you interested in producing as an artist when you were young and you're still in school, undergraduate and graduate work?

Tell me what interested you to put out in physical form. 

Nabil El Jaouhari: I think it might take different visual form, but yeah, it's still very similar subjects that are very much related to kind of childhood. A lot of my work it's about memory in its core. Even in its abstract form, it's about memory. Because the work from my undergrad was about those polaroids and what memories they held and how do I take those and turn them into paintings and prints and, all different kinds of representations or mediums. But As an adult, still, it's always been about memory.

Matt Peiken: So you're saying, it was about memory even then? And then it is today. So the connecting thread of your work even 20 plus years ago to today was memory. 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Probably, yeah, memory in this like obsession with time and memory for sure.

Matt Peiken: What was your rationale or what was stirring inside you to pull on that thread of memory? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yeah, Memory is like a fascinating thing for me, because it's our way of almost coping with a presence. It might relate back to, being maybe scared in my childhood at a certain time, or, it's memory, but memory takes different forms as well.

You have things that are always with us, like this constant memories of certain things. You have nostalgia that is helps us cope with being not very happy with what's going on in our lives right now. Or maybe memory is to Preserve and maintain certain people that are no longer around us or certain places.

Yeah, memory is like a fascinating thing. But I think because the world is our perception and this perception is An accumulation of all these memories or experiences and places that you've been. And I think we always see the world through Some kind of form of memory, in a way.

Matt Peiken: One of the things that struck me about your work, and we'll get to that in a little bit, your current work, is there, you mentioned memory, and I see fragmented memories. You use a lot of, there's different media within your work, the wood burning, There's a lot of ways to interpret that.

Were you doing that even in your younger years in college in graduate school undergrad? Were you working in different mediums within the same piece to evoke different colliding feelings and purposes? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yeah, definitely. This idea that I want to do everything at the same time has always been very me.

I think I'm just very hungry to see how do you take a certain idea and try to play with it and manifest it using different forms. I mean in my grad graduate years I struggled because of that because it's so my program at the University of Missouri wanted to kind of, you know, pin me in painting and keep me there.

And because I came from the French Academy in Beirut, where I had printmaking and ceramics and, and mosaics and stained glass and, painting and all of its forms right there for me to create with and play with. So I built rooms, I made ceramics, I used water slide decals on subway tiles that are re-fired.

And then I had stamps and paintings and all, so many things. And yeah, my, my work now is definitely still that, but it's a visual language that is contained. Wood burning and painting combination came during my time when I lived in Michigan and I was not doing any kind of 2D work to sell or to show I was just working in sculpture for someone.

His name is Brad Grill. He was my professor. 

Matt Peiken: So what was that like for you coming from a very cosmopolitan atmosphere at Lebanese University to a Midwest school that isn't exactly known for its fine art program? What was life like for you in Missouri? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Transitions are hard. Even, no matter how westernized you are, transitions are hard. Because knowing about a place or knowing a certain language is very different than actually living there. Or experiencing it. Yeah, it was hard. It wasn't the easiest thing.

Because Beirut Restaurants open till like midnight, and then pubs open till 2 a. m., and then clubs open till 7 a. m., and everyone is always out, and there's hundreds of places to go to, and then I'm in this like little town, U. S. A., and the university was amazing. the size of the university the buildings, all of that.

And I was very lucky because by the time I made it to the department was going through this like shift. So a lot of the old faculty left, there was a lot of new people being hired, new professors from Yale and from New York and on that level, it was great, but still, it wasn't the easiest experience, for sure. 

Matt Peiken: In America, did you have much opportunity to exhibit your work? Were you getting shows? Were you getting seen? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: No, because, before Asheville, I did not. But that was because I was taken by Other things I was in what they call like survival mode.

Like I'm trying to survive being an immigrant, survive being someone that is not a physician or an architect or has a nine to five job. 

Matt Peiken: You said you had a difficult time until you got to Asheville. In terms of your artwork, were you discouraged to the point of thinking, I'm never going to be able to get my artwork out there? Was there a period of time before you came to Asheville where your artwork really took a backseat just because it had to?

Nabil El Jaouhari: It took a backseat before I went to Michigan, yes, but I never stopped making art. It's so crucial for me to be able to create something. And I never back then made it in the, with the idea that, oh, I'm gonna Try to sell this or try to show this. I was just like doing work.

And I was also experimenting with the wood burning and painting. But to answer your question, yeah, Asheville was like from the minute I got here, I'm selling art, I'm showing art. 

Matt Peiken: When did you move to Asheville and what brought you here? Why Asheville of all places? How did that even open up to you? And when was that?

Nabil El Jaouhari: So I was in Michigan working in sculpture, making these little collages and then I get a message from a friend of mine, she said, I'm moving to Asheville, and I was like, where's Asheville? She said, oh, it's like this really artsy town in North Carolina. And And then, funny enough, two months later, I met Mark Bettis online, and he said why don't you send a few of your work to the gallery and we'll try to sell them.

And sure enough, He paid for shipping and I ended up sending a bunch of these wood burning and collages from my old oil paintings over and they started selling and that was like, okay, I think I'm just gonna move to Asheville and become a painter. 

Matt Peiken: These were your first sales as an artist. 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yes, my first kind of real sales.

So I was doing these little collages on wood burning, and sorry, on live edge wood, that is like wood burning and painting and I would post them, and, people that know me on Instagram, nothing big, but every now and then I would sell like, one to an old friend or an old neighbor, and this or that, and, it was like an extra.

150 to 100 here and there, but I've never sold paintings for, 10, 000. And you did that nature and you did, 

Matt Peiken: and you did through Mark. 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yes. Yeah. Here in Asheville. Yeah. I can't remember how much artwork I've sold in the last year and a half. 

Matt Peiken: That's crazy. So that's, you moved here about a year and a half ago.

Nabil El Jaouhari: I moved here in October 20 21. 

Matt Peiken: Okay. So right in the midst of the pandemic, you moved here. 

Nabil El Jaouhari: And then it's moved some of the bigger work I've done. So I've made these big, elaborate, crazy, wild collages using my old paintings and wood burning. 

And then it started to talk to me about the idea of memory. Of course, the memory of painting in painting. Once you remove pieces of these paintings and force them to sit together on a different surface. You are doing similar work to what memory does and it's like selectivity of certain things.

And then they're pushed together. And I started playing with wood burning because I wanted that idea of the permanent mark versus the removable canvas. 

Matt Peiken: How much experimentation goes into your work? It seems like, because there's such abstraction there, I'm wondering how much is intentional versus just very much spur of the moment mark making, painting, burning, etching.

How much of that is intentional and how much of it is improvisational? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yeah, in its core, all of it is intentional. The visual aspects, of course, some of it is not accidental, but what I say is like certain pieces wanted to sit somewhere. So they want to sit in that specific place. But once you develop a visual language, I think it becomes this kind of, let's say, parallels like a two way street of the intellectual because you come from that academic background, you come from that training, you come from that idea that everything that you are doing needs to be boxed in that aspect of history of art and theories and ideas of that nature.

And then the playfulness aspect of it, that is the, Because when I cut those pieces from those paintings, most of the times, at least early on during my experimentation, I was putting those canvases face down and I cut on the back and I'd not necessarily know what will I actually have on that piece when I turn it over.

Matt Peiken: That's really interesting that you would do it that way. Why be blind in 

Nabil El Jaouhari: that way? 

Because I wanted to see that clash aspect of things, that makes what my work is. Because, I also didn't want to be the work to be like, Oh, I'm taking this painting of still life, for example, and I'm cutting out an apple and placing it on a painting.

That's not what I wanted the work to be. I wanted the work to be, like, mainly... It's like, how do I take these still life studies and landscape studies and figurative studies and cut parts of them that it's like, they're no longer what they are, because that's what memory does in a way, it takes a certain part of a bigger event and kind of abstracts it and then forces it to sit it with other memories from Other bigger pictures in a way, and the same thing what those paintings were, or what my experimentation was. 

Matt Peiken: Do you see, since you've had the connecting thread of memory running through your work ever since your school years, were there ever any periods of memory you were specifically trying to mine?

For instance, in your most recent exhibition at Mark Bettis Gallery, do those works represent a certain Theme within memory, or are they very across 

Nabil El Jaouhari: the board? 

No, yeah, the latest show was called The Impermanence of Things, and I was like, looking into Japanese poetry, and this idea of monono aware, which is a concept about the pathos of things, or the gentle sadness that is related To that kind of eternal changing aspect of nature and the perishable body in a way, 

Matt Peiken: What inspired you to go down that route?

Nabil El Jaouhari: Whenever I'm thinking of a show, I'm always thinking of what is the overarching idea that is underneath that kind of. I can take this visual language that I created of the collage and the wood burning and submit it to that concept. Because I stencil with fire sometimes instead of just using the wood burning, I sometimes put pebbles and stones or shells or whatever I find and I torch them and then I remove them to leave this aura of that there was something there.

And this idea of having something there and then I burn around it and then I remove it. And what you're seeing is this kind of vague stenciling of something that was there. It fascinated me because I was looking at these things I'm stenciling and these kind of almost, they almost give you like this feel of a backlight.

And that made me think about How things were there and they were removed, and so I started looking into these ideas of these concepts that are related to the impermanence of things or the pathos of things. 

Matt Peiken: It seems, tell me if I'm wrong on this. That you're playing in your studio and finding things, like you mentioned, finding the light that comes through.

That's not something you planned on, but when you found it, it opened up an idea of expression within you. 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yeah. I think that's how my brain, as an artist, works. It's this idea that I... I see something and I start to look at it to understand it just the way that I was like thinking about these pieces that came from different paintings in relationship to memory and displacement and because these paintings came from Lebanon, they came from a different time, different world, different place. Every brush stroke, every subject carried so much of the person that I used to be before I came here. And then, so it was like as if I'm doing a work about memory that is also about being an immigrant, also about being displaced. Also about the struggle of this displacement, but, 

Matt Peiken: are you still feeling that struggle? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: I don't think as someone that was not born and raised here, that struggle ever goes away. Because I don't think anyone understands what it is to be an immigrant other than being an immigrant. 

Matt Peiken: How has your immigrant experience evolved or changed?

You've been in this country now since, when did you first here? 2009. 2009 you first arrived here, so it's been 14 years now. How has your experience as an immigrant evolved in that time? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: Not to drift so far away from the artwork, but I think that I In my work, you asked me about this kind of experimentation and playfulness aspect to it.

And that's exactly how my work is created. But when the intellect comes in, what it does, it has that ability to create the transitional aspect. And that's what, in my opinion, marks a good Artist is the one that has the power to create those transitions between the playfulness and the intellectual aspect.

And that's exactly what my kind of trip or so far my, my journey as an immigrant has been. It's this eternal aspect of me being conditioned into this culture. I'm just always conditioning of understanding the body language of Americans the decision making the passive aggressiveness or the plain aggressiveness or the history of this country and the history of this place and this is when you have to find that balance of the raw Feelings that are so much of an immigrant with that kind of intellect of understanding and being able to do those transitions just the way you do them in an artwork.

I think that most of the times it's and it's very funny because it's very known about Lebanese people in general that they don't necessarily seek other Lebanese people when they're abroad, because I think it's very much rooted in the complex history of the country itself. Because it's 18 different religions, let alone the cultural aspect of all of those religions and all of those subcultures that are living in such a small place, and then it's not necessarily that I, I'm not came here trying to find a Lebanese church or a Lebanese mosque or to feel at home.

I'm more intrigued by knowing about American culture, and I'm an American now, so it's my culture as well. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. Well, do you think that plays into your present day art that you're making? That it's very much of your experience here as much as it is your past that you're drawing from your Lebanese paintings?

Nabil El Jaouhari: Yeah, definitely. the people that buy my art, the people that look at my art, they are mostly Americans, and in one way or another, There has to be part of me where I'm of course the work, no matter how intellectual and conceptual it is, it has that psyche aspect of who we are, and who we've been, and where we've been, and our childhood, and our memories, and all of that.

But, so many times that becomes, after a while, the underlayer of the work. Whether... I'm painting now, I don't know, some commission of a landscape or a commission of a bouquet of flowers.

Matt Peiken: What are you working on now? When are we going to see new work from you? 

Nabil El Jaouhari: I'm working on big scale magic realism landscapes that are. Post the impermanence of things, which was on the darker side, like visually now I'm working on this very colorful, bright elaborate magic realism landscapes.

They're almost like secret gardens that are Very welcoming and it makes me happy because I feel like maybe it's like the work is taking like a very unexpected shift for me, but I'm loving it so far.