For the first time at Art Basel Miami Beach, CARBON 12 is delighted to present the works of Nour Malas. Nour Malas (b.1995, France), known for her emotionally charged paintings, draws from deeply personal and collective histories of displacement, memory, and identity. Her work emerges at the intersection of abstraction and narrative, exploring how trauma and resilience coexist in the wake of war.
After 14 years of war, starvation, and systemic violence, Syria's dictatorship has become an emboldened force, leaving fractured communities and a scattered diaspora. Displacement dissolves any fixed sense of home, turning belonging into an unstable condition. In this ambiguity, the search for consistency offers fragile reassurance, even as the cracks beneath remain visible. War embeds itself in the psyche, shaping one’s sense of self, memory, and how the body carries loss.
The four panel painting unfolds across three walls, immersing viewers in a visual field that moves between destruction and renewal. Inspired by Guernica, the quadtych explores how war reshapes identity, memory, and the human experience. The work comments on historical and contemporary struggles, focusing on loss, memory, and resilience. Urgent in more ways than one, its poignant messaging offers critical insight to the current political climate in the artist’s home country. The quadtych is not a depiction of war itself, nor a documentation of the events that have unfolded. Rather, a response: a way for Malas to excavate the profound and complex ways in which war reshapes identity, memory, and the very fabric of the human experience.
Malas’s process is one of surrender; she does not impose control but allows raw, gestural movement to guide the work. She records the lingering impacts on the psyche and body, tracing the crevices through memory and spirit. The paintings are built through accumulation, carrying the mark of each gesture, much like the body and land carry the history of conflict. It conveys the seismic shifts within the individual and collective, inhabiting the space between what is seen and felt. This duality of presence and absence being both within and outside of chaos becomes central to the work.
The scale is integral to its impact. Spanning three walls, the painting consumes the space. Malas invites the viewer into a realm of personal and collective subconscious, where the fragility of human experience collides with the overwhelming forces of history. The composition resists traditional boundaries: figures emerge and dissolve, marks stretch beyond edges, and layered surfaces create an atmosphere of rupture and repair.
Gestural layers reveal forms shifting between abstraction and representation, showing evidence of memory and experience. Malas’s painterly language conveys tragedy, resilience, and transformation. Greens and yellows emerge as a symbol of independence, rebirth, and renewal. Her palette reflects the passing of time throughout the 14 years, as she reckons with the idea that, after years of devastation, a future beyond survival may exist.
Malas’s work meditates on the tension between exile and memory, where displacement intersects with a renewed desire for rebirth and healing. The pain of losing a homeland and the hope for recovery create an ongoing, reshaped identity. As her most expansive work, this painting unfolds a narrative from turmoil to a newfound sense of potential. For the first time, Malas experiences a new vision for Syria, channeling that shift into her work, making it tangible, undeniable, and visible. The quadtych opens a space where grief and resilience coexist, where history lingers, and where hope, tentative yet insistent, begins to take form.