Giant Heads: Nahem Shoa

Ordinary life becomes larger than life in the Giant Heads series of paintings by Nahem Shoa, icons of 21 Century urban life which transforms the individual into the universal. These massive images have mountainous landscape monumentality, features take on huge proportions.

The paint becomes sculptural, built up like dried layers of mud shaped by a river, over weeks and months of searching the models faces. One feels his remarkable desire to capture the human spirit. "I try to define ‡something very intimate about the sitters," Shoa explains, "their inner presence, completely opposite to the huge scale I paint them in. My aim is to capture a duality of the inner and the outer world, where the paint and the human to merge and to become a living reality.

Underpinning these seemingly abstract marks and strong colours is a rock like foundation of drawing, and observation. He is uncompromising in his desire for truth. Stand eight feet away from the canvas and what seems random now looks ordered, classical. Every mark by Shoa is an attempt at real discovery the paint becomes life and life becomes paint.

"My objective is to make the surface itself so alive and charged, not relying on the scale, which
already has intrinsic impact. I have to invent my own language through seeing, discovering how to transform paint into a huge nose or lip, with out using illustrational clichés." There is something uncompromising in Shoa’s approach, utterly raw, where pictorial truth becomes a new reality. The process of looking becomes so much more than just paint, like Monet’s Late Water Lilies’ they are more than flowers on water.

It is exciting to see an artist in the beginning of the21st century painting Black and Multi cultural heads, a subject matter that has never been given a true place in art. Painted so close up, breaking down the barriers of space between model and viewer brings us closer to another human being and places us all into the human drama called modern life