“They were windows looking in upon fiery reality…”
Salma Sarriedine presents Nassim Dayoub’s debut New York City exhibition Prophecies, featuring a curation of wall works drawing on tattoo and revolutionary iconography. Employing painting on found materials, including wood, deer hide, and snakeskin, Dayoub offers a meditation on the inscribing of the body as a storytelling methodology and ritual in the face of grief, asking: What do we do with all this?
In Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, the protagonist meets a figure whose tattooed skin tells the future. A dermagraphic opus of people, animals, constellations, and planets rendered in miniature full color comes alive once the sun sets, its inhabitants acting out their celestial dramas. A single space on his back, left empty, serves as a scrying mirror offering messages and ominous prophecies for the person fortunate—or unfortunate—enough to spend time gazing into its blankness.
In contrast, the tattooed forms of Nassim Dayoub’s paintings are saturated with timeless images of power and hope: A fist tames a ferocious, winding snake. An angel of revolution descends from the heavens, distributing rifles to the earthly residents below. Two embracing figures intertwine, the glyphs on their skin knitting into one another. In Dayoub’s prophecies, people scale unscalable walls, the blazing sun is something within reach, and wild serpents drape protectively around the body.
Situating his work in a lineage of craft traditions, including tattooing alongside Syrian embroidery and ceramic motifs, Dayoub suggests the body as an adorned vessel whose exterior bears the marks of history. Largely faceless and indiscernible as distinct people, the artist’s forms offer a type of galvanic everyman, an alluring arsenal of compositions one could easily imagine stepping into and inhabiting on their own skin. Rather than a set of images chosen to simply affirm the wearer as an individual, these tattoos describe the world as a collective experience. Dayoub employs mainstays of traditional tattoo imagery, repeating roses, daggers, flames, and skulls as visual incantations. Equal parts protective charm and sigil of hope, the bodysuits are rendered in a meditative, spontaneous process that invites rhythmic improvisation, inviting viewers to find meaning in the resulting compositions. Sensitive to movement in the air around them, Dayoub’s textiles are, at the same time, flags flying declarative icons and reflective surfaces fluttering with glimpses of the future’s possibility.
While the images adorning Bradbury’s protagonist trouble him, the same images, “riot[s] of rockets and fountains and people,” burn with promise and optimism in Dayoub’s paintings. Flames lick at the edges of the bodies he sketches as the ground for his compositions, though rather than impending immolation, they suggest a cathartic protectiveness—a ring of fire burning away what threatens us all.
-Tamara Santibañez
“What if I could tattoo on you a future that is worth living for? Could you survive this present moment? Would it serve as a reminder when you feel like each day could be your last? Tattoo a word, a warning, a prophecy. Carrying on tradition like a battle cry.” - Nassim Dayoub