When Navid Nuur (°1976, Teheran) talks about his work he often uses terms like ‘clean’ or ‘pure’ or occasionally even ‘warm’.
The way in which he relates to material, the space around him and his observations regarding this could almost be described as devout. Through his attention to detail and the careful coordination of the various components of a work or an exhibition the spectator becomes a participant in an ‘internal’ world. Nuur’s work – which at first glance appears to be developed very conceptually – reveals a highly personal approach to image in which the presentation of the question plays a central role. How a certain phrase requires a specific structure for example or how variations in tones of red and blue can evoke different shades of purple for example. What Nuur shares with the conceptual artists of the sixties is the relationship between concept and form. However in his work form is not simply a result of the idea but develops by way of a subjective programme of requirements or rules in which intuition plays a key role. Navid Nuur says: ‘it is a certainty based on feeling which I can only explain later on. However if you have to rationalize a work in order to justify it , it becomes conceptually dead.’ He uses concepts that are related to a temporary interim situation that places his work between the spectator and what is often an abstract phenomenon such as light, energy, air or ‘remaining/ residual space’. Nuur’s formal idiom and the meaning he attributes to a work are therefore purely part of a process. His work is in fact a depiction of this process and is therefore transitory in almost all of its manifestations. Consequently, it would be better to describe the installations, drawings and objects he creates as ‘thought models’. Which is why he prefers to refer to his works as’ interimodules’ where the word ‘module’ refers to the way of thinking and the actual conceptualising of it and ‘interim’ to the temporary ‘between’, the process aspect of his work.
‘The Value of Void’ exhibition in the Kunst Nu-area in S.M.A.K. presents several of Nuur’s spatially remembered works as well as several new works. As regards content, the exhibition is a sort of ‘prequel’ to two of Navid Nuur’s forthcoming exhibitions in the Fridericianum in Kassel and in ‘De Hallen’ in Haarlem. A catalogue of all his work produced so far will be published at the end of the three exhibitions.
