How does The Split of Life elucidate its Analysis and interpretations?
In examining the works in the Split of Life series, some studies point to compositional and thematic aspects in conjunction with a set of distinctive concepts, in particular, the human subject, the Gods, the luminous sky, and the concealing self-concealing earth.The human figures appear as the flesh of humanity, always compelled by the law of regeneration, offering itself willingly to the torments of domination and submission. Human suffering and torment seem to have always existed. They bear the pain and continue to remain in this dreadful state dictated by a delinquent social reality. In the split of Life, they exist in a new and different reality created by the artist imagination on big canvases in which they make their case as condemned beings. Their presence disturbs and troubles us. We find ourselves immersed in their world whose reality becomes our own reality.The Gods appear immortal but not eternal; each Holy Family presides only over one epoch in the history of men with the Gods. The powers (beyond Good and Evil) into which “Necessity is analyzed have no history; they crush humanity within the eternal circle of helpless reflection and unconscious desire.”The picture surface occludes the sky, the empty space of the horizon that makes possible light, darkness, and their relations, the horizon as a boundary between sky and earth. the composition covers that space and all its cognitive illusions The explosions of wars wreaking destruction and devastation inflamed and obfuscated the blue sky with dark forms erupting from earth burning fires. The violent scenes disturbs the chromatic gamut of chiaroscuro, light and shadow through which the victims emerge from the canvases with a common sigh of an open injury sustained by social reality.  The pictorial layout extends to the edges of the canvases as light or dark with no space. Light emanates from the figures and use the, so light, therefore, is ultimately a force Light, space, sky closely relate to forms of redemption through irony, acceptance of mortality, the story of people, light against darkness.
The earth absorbs the forces that conceal, and conceal themselves in, everything that comes to light. The earth cannot appear by itself; it needs of painting, of the choice of the painter, even as it consumes them. Kanso explores the terror that surrounds the act of choice of self-choice, of painting. The paintings bring out the earthly nightmares that have concealed the serenity of paradise and peace, and transmit a new calling for an awakening.In discussing artistic tendencies, it is remarked that Kanso breaks with the pictorial traditions of both the East and the West. He gives us instead the Middle, "the chasm of necessity that yawns at the heart of human contingency and universal contingency."The gap in the middle provided the ground for a total redefinition of painting in a style in which Kanso departed from the pictorial conventions of both the East and West. He presents a view of the world and its forms in terms of its multiplicity and interrelatedness. A world in which the political boundaries are not arbitrarily drawn by the superpowers.  In the words of Edward Said "The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home the more one is able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance."The question of cultural multiplicity as opposed to cultural dislocation comes into play. Orientalism is a form of cultural dislocation because it imposed a western culture on the “orient” in such a way that what is reflected back by the Orient is not the Oriental culture but instead a colonized culture. Cultural multiplicity on the other hand is maintaining one’s own cultural identity and presenting it with other cultures. It is noted that “Nabil Kanso is the first Middle Eastern artist to surface outside, if not against the framework of colonialism.” He presents a view of the world through the boundary situations of death, love, suffering, and guilt. The organization of these boundary situation, a critic points out, constitutes his poetics, which is "predicated on a profound human kingship with the West and an amazed expectant detachment from it. From this circle he derives his extraordinary power of expression."
Orient Edward Said Nabil Kanso Orientalism