The word surrender has many connotations. While it suggests an element of struggle, surrender can also be freeing as it implies a decision to persevere and embrace the difficult things in life. Surrender can be a form of problem-solving, and a way to cope with the complexities of the human experience. In creating her latest body of work, Nadia Ayari found surrender to be the missing ingredient in her well-refined practice. Visually, her six new oil-on-linen compositions resemble the paintings she’s been making for years. They feature vibrant pink flowers—a composite of species based on jasmines popular in her home country of Tunisia—on bold, solid- colored backgrounds. While firmly in the realm of painting, they contain a sculptural element in the heavy material quality of the surface. Where the new works diverge is subtle and lies within Ayari learning to “surrender to the process,” she says, a discovery that lent itself to the exhibition title, About Surrender.
Ayari has been developing her process for the last 10 years, constantly redefining the “recipe” as she calls it. She chooses colors instinctively. With Cascade (2023), for example, her choice of cadmium orange informed the use of purple in Interlace and Preen (both 2024), creating a dynamic contrast across the show. She works wet on wet in several layers of paint, focusing on the overall composition first and homing in on the details of colors and brushwork as the piece evolves. The process is inherently exacting, as she builds the surface with precision, embracing the messiness of oil while also meticulously controlling it. She is constantly mixing palettes to achieve nuanced gradients. Each painting has three or four palettes, to which she adds solvent and uses smaller brushes as the colors become more specific. “I might start a branch with a layer of very little solvent and three colors—a light, a mid, and a dark—and I do this twice,” she says. “The next layer I’ll do five colors with a smaller brush, and the last layer will have nine or eleven colors. I spend a lot of time counting, my process has taken on a form of alchemy.” The more layers she creates, the more textured and heavier the piece becomes. At times, her surface even resembles velvet, a result of this layering.
As she prepared for the show, she found that the new body of work was obstinate, resisting this fine-tuned process. “Usually, I can come up with repeated motifs, but these paintings would not let me do that,” she says. “Each painting wanted to be explored singularly.” She also found the brushwork was uncooperative. While in previous compositions she might use an upward brushstroke to contrast a downward-facing flower, for example, the brushstrokes in the flowers in About Surrender face downward, as do the petals themselves, which at times descend with such intensity they become visual representations of gravity.
In Twirl (2023), two curving, tube-like stems further this sense of movement. Teetering between symmetry and asymmetry, the work is visually complex, seemingly static in its solidity and crisp lines while also retaining a sense of motion in the brushstrokes and bold swirls of the stem. Balancing this is Repose (2024), in which a singular flower rests on a stem that softly curves through the bright orange background, almost as if the tight spiral in Twirl has slowly unfurled.
“Ultimately, surrender is a celebration because it’s simply what I needed to do to make this work,” Ayari says. Indeed, there is something triumphant in the way the flower lightly relaxes its weight on the stem in Repose, a visual embodiment of Ayari’s surrender.
“Being an artist and making art is a way for me to be more engaged with my community,” she says. “Art making is a negotiation between the personal and the political. There is a political dimension to the work because I am a person living in the world we live in today, and surrendering to the creative process gives me the bandwidth to make more conscientious choices. I hope viewers can see this and understand the emancipatory potential of making things.”
— Annabel Keenan
