The Fingertips That Perceived

Ibrahim Mahmoud

“Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”— Paul Cézanne, letter to Émile Bernard, 1904

The artist Nasr Warour is engaged in an experience distinctly his own—hardly a revelation, yet profoundly decisive. For him, experience assumes a recurrent, generative, womb-like condition: a cyclical state through which art is brought forth. The themes emerging from this process do not confine themselves to local or environmental specificity; rather, they gesture toward a world that exceeds such limits. Once experience has fulfilled its generative function, its identifying marks recede, much like the middle term in traditional logic that disappears after mediating between premises.

At that point, the fingertips—within the pictorial field—have completed their creative obligation. They remain faithful to the bodies that entrust them with the task of transferring a trust: from the realm of imagined non-being into the domain of presence, where being encounters itself as being. What is marked here is no longer a mere signpost along a predetermined path; it is an invitation—indeed, a necessity—to turn aside and attend to difference.

Such a gesture belongs to the legacy of modernity, with its multi-functional luminosity and its refusal of closure. Modernity, as Irving Howe has argued, never seals itself within a single image or definitive analysis; it remains open, plural, and productively unsettled. Its aesthetic force lies in multiplicity, in what might be called a splendid disorder, and in a commitment to the aesthetics of endless renewal. Here, improvisation becomes a paradoxical “tradition of the new”—a condition that sets provisional limits for what is, by nature, limitless.

Within the lived reality of the artist, artistic presence coincides with the activation of aesthetic sensibility itself. It draws us out of the narrow bandwidth of the everyday and stages the arrival of the awaited—if only as consolation, if only as a promise of difference. Through this encounter, we are urged to inhabit our earthly bodies at a more vital rhythm, tuning ourselves to our inner life once it has shed its constricting properties in favor of a sung, expansive openness.

This constitutes a renewed relationship with what might be called our river-like bodies—bodies that extend beyond their apparent boundaries. Yet we often neglect the very extremities to which we assign only incidental roles, forgetting the spiritual pleasure that might reach us were we to venture further into their latent capacities. To sense their gentleness, their delicacy, and the exploratory spirit that resides within them is to glimpse an alternative world—one not given, but discovered.

It is precisely this mode of discovery that becomes visible in what the painted fingertips in Warour’s work have claimed: an art in which touch perceives, matter thinks, and form becomes a site of epistemic encounter.

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This text is an excerpt from a larger critical book by Ibrahim Mahmoud devoted to the works of Nasr Warour, including the collection The Dust Between. In this context, the reference to “fingertips” pertains primarily to the hands of the depicted figures within the paintings—conceived as tactile markers of material existence—rather than to the artist’s hand alone.