The Split of Life

The Split of Life is a series of over 80 mural size oil paintings by Nabil Kanso. The paintings span a period from 1974 to 1994, and deal with contemporary and historical issues of war and violence.
Development and description.
The subject of war in Kanso’s work began during 1972–1974 in New York when he did a series of paintings and drawings on the Vietnam War. After a brief pause, he started in 1975 the Lebanon war series evoked by the civil war that broke out in his native land. The intersection of the two series reflecting similarity in composition, scale, style and theme provided the framework for a larger series whose underlying theme formed the basis of "the Split of Life" series in encompassing several other series dealing with war.
"The Split of Life" series delineates two periods: 1974–1985 and 1986–1994. The works of the first period are characterized by the use of warm colors dominated by red, orange, yellow and black, and the depiction of compositions in which masses of figures occupy the entire surface plane. Among the series in the period are the "Vietnam", "Lebanon", "One-Minute" on (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and "Time Suspended in Space" on (South Africa) series. The works of the 1986–94 period depict compositions that divide the canvas in two or more sections depicting figures painted in dark blue and black within an enclosure of red and orange surrounded by a white space. Everywhere in the painting there is the dynamics of transformation, rather than static forms of distribution and knowledge. Among the series in this period are the Cluster Matter, Glory and Cruelty, and Living Memory (Auschwitz) series. It is suggested that most of the "Split of Life" paintings are recessive in the upper center, and somewhat bilaterally symmetrical. This division is often in the form of a face placed against a V form. The violence seems to deploy itself towards that opening so that the center is dominated by a mother of war, a kali-figure.
Analysis and interpretations.
In examining the works in the "Split of Life" series, some studies point to compositional and thematic aspects in conjunction with a set of distinctive concepts, in particular, the human subject, the Gods, the luminous sky, and the concealing self-concealing earth.
The human figures appear as the flesh of humanity, always compelled by the law of regeneration, offering itself willingly to the torments of domination and submission. Human suffering and torment seem to have always existed. They bear the pain and continue to remain in this dreadful state dictated by a delinquent social reality. In the split of Life, they exist in a new and different reality created by the artist imagination on big canvases in which they make their case as condemned beings. Their presence disturbs and troubles us. We find ourselves immersed in their world whose reality becomes our own reality.
The Gods appear immortal but not eternal; each Holy Family presides only over one epoch in the history of men with the Gods. The powers (beyond Good and Evil) into which “Necessity is analyzed have no history; they crush humanity within the eternal circle of helpless reflection and unconscious desire.”
The picture surface occludes the sky, the empty space of the horizon that makes possible light, darkness, and their relations, the horizon as a boundary between sky and earth. the composition covers that space and all its cognitive illusions The explosions of wars wreaking destruction and devastation inflamed and obfuscated the blue sky with dark forms erupting from earth burning fires. The violent scenes disturbs the chromatic gamut of chiaroscuro, light and shadow through which the victims emerge from the canvases with a common sigh of an open injury sustained by social reality. The pictorial layout extends to the edges of the canvases as light or dark with no space. Light emanates from the figures and use the, so light, therefore, is ultimately a force Light, space, sky closely relate to forms of redemption through irony, acceptance of mortality, the story of people, light against darkness.
The earth absorbs the forces that conceal, and conceal themselves in, everything that comes to light. The earth cannot appear by itself; it needs of painting, of the choice of the painter, even as it consumes them. Kanso explores the terror that surrounds the act of choice of self-choice, of painting. The paintings bring out the earthly nightmares that have concealed the serenity of paradise and peace, and transmit a new calling for an awakening.
In discussing artistic tendencies, it is remarked that Kanso breaks with the pictorial traditions of both the East and the West. He gives us instead the Middle, "the chasm of necessity that yawns at the heart of human contingency and universal contingency."
The gap in the middle provided the ground for a total redefinition of painting in a style in which Kanso departed from the pictorial conventions of both the East and West. He presents a view of the world and its forms in terms of its multiplicity and interrelatedness. A world in which the political boundaries are not arbitrarily drawn by the superpowers. In the words of Edward Said "The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home the more one is able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance."
The question of cultural multiplicity as opposed to cultural dislocation comes into play. Orientalism is a form of cultural dislocation because it imposed a western culture on the “orient” in such a way that what is reflected back by the Orient is not the Oriental culture but instead a colonized culture. Cultural multiplicity on the other hand is maintaining one’s own cultural identity and presenting it with other cultures. It is noted that “Nabil Kanso is the first Middle Eastern artist to surface outside, if not against the framework of colonialism.” He presents a view of the world through the boundary situations of death, love, suffering, and guilt. The organization of these boundary situation, a critic points out,constitutes his poetics, which is "predicated on a profound human kingship with the West and an amazed expectant detachment from it. From this circle he derives his extraordinary power of expression."
Exhibitions.
Between 1983 and 1993, a wide range of paintings from various phases of "The Split of Life" series were exhibited a various art centers in Argentina BrazilMexico, Panama, Korea,Kuwait, Sweden, Switzerland and Venezuela, 
The exhibitions were the subject of articles, essays, poems, conferences, and peace projects. In Venezuela, installations were featured as part of the Second Ibero-American Symposium held in Caracas in 1987, the International Encounter for Peace in Mérida in 1988. 
The paintings displayed in different exhibitions were viewed as reflecting a sense of "over-all-ness, of one painting running into another." It is remarked that the magnitude of the paintings place the viewer in the midst of a violent cage. Their synchrony and diachronic cross a still point in which the show is no longer a total of several pieces, but only one painting. Some critics point to a sense of entrapment in which standing in the central space surrounded by Kanso’s 12-foot-high paintings is as close as you get to being in the middle of a fire. "The painted holocaust surrounding us," a reviewer wrote "entrapped us in cage of feeling". "In encountering these paintings", a critic remarked, "it would be impossible to escape. The scenes draw the viewer in witnessing the violent events." “We find ourselves immersed in this violent totality, terrible and incisive, we are trapped." The horrors appear to burst out of the canvases bringing the viewer face to face with scenes reflecting a continuum of war and violence occurring in our time and space.
1984-85 series.
In 1985, Kanso exhibited a series of seven paintings that covered the walls of the gallery at Nexus Contemporary Art Center reflecting in the opinion of one reviewer “a monumental display of neo-expressionist horrors of war.” "The horrors of war in Lebanon" an art critic wrote "have fueled the fires that burn in these very effective paintings," “In the face of horror,” remarked one critic, “there are only two courses: to circumscribe, create a bar, an absolute demarcation, to be “at one” with the confluence and to refuse to overcome it- or to obsess to the point of no return, to create a canvas the size and shape of the original, a one-to-one mapping of the real upon itself, which uses the body of the artist “in a transitive sense” across it. And that is what is occurring in these paintings.” A reviewer thought of the expressions as “a tapestry of souls, struggling, reaching for one another… painted jazz rhythms of naked spirits climbing an interminable Jacob’s ladder in a metaphorical conflagration which repulses and sucks us all in. 
In examining the series of seven paintings executed in 1984-85, art critics point to a variety of themes, in particular, power, death, and sexuality, and the poetics, which organize the themes within the paintings. The interrelatedness of these themes and the composed symbols associated with them provide a framework that lend crucial meaning to the paintings. Doorways, empty centers, and ladders exist in all these paintings. In critical opinion, they carry with them a message of a change or a shift in the modes of power from a system, which controls through repression and reduction, connected to the law of the sovereign, to a positive system which aims to promote and execute life and whose connection is to the social body.