Dividing his time between Beirut, where he was born in 1949, and New York, where he settled after studying at Yale, Nahas initially chose not to choose between these two poles, fusing together the ornamental motifs of Islamic art and the gesturality of post-war American abstraction. Marked by the apocalyptic vision of the Hamptons coast, where he lived at the time, littered with seaweed and starfish washed up after Hurricane Bob in 1991, he made it the motif on which to deploy his painting. This is reflected in four large undulating canvases from 2022 from the Constellation series exhibited at Château La Coste. "To me, these paintings speak once again of my interest in the cycles of nature, and more precisely the way in which nature, by linking the microscopic to the macroscopic, ends up composing a single whole. Leaving the invisible for the tangible, another set lets detail a series of paintings of olive trees, palm trees and cedars as many portraits recalling Lebanon to his memory. Even in the darkest moments: the double explosion of August 4, 2020 summons in his painting silhouettes of charcoal trunks, persisting in exposing their arborescences, on glowing backgrounds.

Extract from the article by Tom Laurent published in the N°106 of the magazine Art Absolument. Publication on May 17, 2023.

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