Silver Nejad - Odalisque Endormie

Silver NEJAD (1929–1995)
A Sleeping Odalisque, 1991
Glued directly onto a 50 x 65 sheet.
Oil pastel on waxed paper, signed and dated.
Handwritten inscription: Decalogue – 1st figure – Sleeping odalisque.
Silver Nejad has developed an unconventional career, outside the traditional institutional circuits. Trained in decorative arts, illustration and cinema before dedicating himself to painting, he has throughout his career kept a close relationship to the stage, to narration, and to spatial arrangement. In the 1960s, he participated in experimental projects blending image, set design, and environment, notably on the Côte d’Azur, a context in which his taste for hybrid visual devices is asserted.
Dated 1991, A Sleeping Odalisque belongs to the late period of her work. The inscription Decalogue – 1st character suggests the existence of a structured set, designed as a sequence of figures or roles. This terminology—“character,” “Decalogue”—allows the hypothesis of work tied to a narrative or staging project, possibly a preparatory illustration for a play, a performance, or an unidentified dramaturgical device, a hypothesis coherent with the artist's education and cross-disciplinary practices.
The choice of the odalisque theme situates the work within a long iconographic tradition stemming from 19th-century Orientalism, but here detached from any exotic or descriptive aim. For Silver Nejad, the figure becomes an archetype, a vehicle for mental and dramatic projection, closer to a role than to an academic subject. This approach brings his work closer to a late Symbolist figure, where the image functions as a suspended scene, laden with cultural resonances.
Against the prevailing trends of the French art scene at the turn of the 1990s — neo-expressionism, Free Figuration, or conceptual practices — Silver Nejad remains faithful to a poetic and narrative figuration, nourished by theatrical and cinematic references. An asleep odalisque thus testifies to the dramaturgical dimension of his later work, where painting becomes a space for storytelling, for roles, and for visual memory.