Marwan W. Nahlé, “An Italian Fortress”

Ehren Clark would have loved this show at the Sweet Branch Library—The Domains of the Mystical. The loose, swirling, sometimes turbulent brushwork; the small figures caught up in backgrounds that dissolve into clouds of abstract color fields—all this would have appealed to our late colleague. He might have written something along the lines of what he said about the artist’s work at Phillips Gallery in 2013: “These images, so small yet filled with the vastness of the human condition, are the essence of the empyrean… Nahlé shows just how intense and real artistic vision can be—even on canvases the size of a paperback… He is a neo-Romantic: his figures stand small before landscapes charged with awe, mystery, and the sublime.”

Nahlé is the son of a postwar Lebanese artist of some note, and spent an itinerant childhood across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East before he came to Utah in the late 1990s, drawn to the desert’s silence and space, and found an artistic home at Phillips Gallery, where he has become known for his contemplative, spiritually-toned visual language.

At the Sweet Branch, there are about two dozen works, none larger than a notebook, full of figures caught up in emotionally charged landscapes propelled by a sense of movement and shifting weather. Nahlé emphasizes atmosphere over realism, gesture over detail, emotional resonance over narrative clarity. He is a Romantic with a capital R, though less in the German mode of Caspar David Friedrich—with its meticulously rendered visions of the awful and the awesome, the sublime—and more in the emotional exoticism of Delacroix and his Expressionist descendants. His landscapes feel emotional rather than geographic, anchored by small, simplified figures—often just one or a few—that give the viewer a sense of scale and humanity while emphasizing the immensity of the environment around them. It’s a collection that feels unified, contemplative, and richly expressive—inviting the viewer into a world where color and mood tell the story as much as the figures themselves.

A survey of the artist’s website reveals that beyond these mystical paintings for which he is best known, Nahlé maintains a varied multidisciplinary practice that spans recycled sculpture, mixed-media constructions, collage, and representational painting. His recycle-art works repurpose discarded materials into often anthropomorphic assemblages that foreground texture and material history, while his mixed-media pieces and collages layer paint, photographic fragments, and found graphics into dense hybrid images, surreal composite figures, and symbolic arrangements. These can be raw and jarring—less appropriate for this library space, which often functions as a playroom for neighborhood toddlers—as well as playful and touched with an irreverent, almost childlike imagination. They reveal an artist continually testing the boundaries of form and material, building a visual universe far more expansive than the mystical mode alone suggests. Ehren would have liked them. And we hope, one day, to review them.

Marwan W. Nahlé, “A Place in Time,” acrylic

The Domains of the Mystical, Sweet Branch Library, Salt Lake City, through Dec. 20.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.