Nima Nabavi

A note on the new works

The works in this delivery are this year’s explorations so far - new branches on the same tree. Some pick up languages I set down years ago; some push established systems one step further; a few open territory I haven’t touched before. They were made with whatever tools each idea required: plotted ink, graphite, acrylic marker, brush pens, and custom software developed along the way.

Everything here is tied to something real - a memory, a place, a practice, a feeling I could not always put into words - and every piece borrows from and feeds the works around it.

- Nima

As Above So Below, As Within So Without

2026
Archival ink on canvas
83.8 × 55.9 cm (33 × 22 in), unframed

The title borrows from the hermetic axiom of correspondence - the idea that macrocosm and microcosm mirror one another, that the outer world reflects the inner one. The composition enacts this principle in its own structure: mirrored above and below, it folds in on itself around a central form that reads as an eye, an eclipse, or a portal. Up close, the image dissolves into its atomic parts - dot after dot, each a discrete mark of ink and time. At a distance, those parts cohere into radiant, vibrating fields of color. The work asks the viewer to move between these two ways of seeing, and suggests they were never separate at all. This piece is composed of more than one million individual ink dots, drawn by pen on canvas through a custom plotting process originally developed for ‘Source Code’, 2025. The color field also builds on the pattern and palette of the ‘Series 8’ works.

Head in the Clouds

2026
Archival ink on cotton rag paper
50.8 × 76.2 cm (20 × 30 in), unframed

“Head in the Clouds” is drawn in archival ink on cotton rag paper, built from thousands of plotted lines radiating through a sixteen-pointed star. At the center, the geometry is crisp and exact; toward the edges, those same lines soften and accumulate into something atmospheric - precision billowing into cloud. The title takes a phrase usually aimed at dreamers as a gentle dismissal, and inverts it into something aspirational: the clouds, after all, are where the sunrises and sunsets happen. A tribute to skies encountered over long hours outdoors, the piece continues the artist’s exploration of the meeting point between mathematics and nature, extending the trajectory of works like “Neverender” and “The Feeling I Get From You” from the 2025 solo exhibition “Sunrise At The Vortex.”

Raspberry Dreamsicle

2026
Archival ink on cotton rag paper
50.8 × 50.8 cm (20 × 20 in), unframed

“Raspberry Dreamsicle” is drawn in archival ink on cotton rag paper, radiating from a thirty-two-pointed star - thirty-two being the artist’s favorite number as a child, a private signature embedded in the geometry. Structurally, the piece is a deliberate stripping-back of “Odyssey,” “Oracle,” and “Time, Time, Time” from the 2025 exhibition “Sunrise At The Vortex,” which sent dense fields of parallel lines moving through a circular plane. Here, the line count and palette are radically reduced, so that the central contraction becomes fully visible and each color is allowed to saturate, undiluted by infinite intersections. The bands converging at the center still belong to the 16 × 16 grid system that has underpinned the artist’s work since Series 1 (2018) - an echo of the original language, now cut loose to sweep across the whole composition. What the reduction revealed, unexpectedly, was a memory: the raspberry-and-vanilla ice pops of childhood summers in Dubai, eaten in the sun on the way to the pool. The magenta center is pure raspberry; the creamy yellows glowing between the orange rays are vanilla melting in heat. A piece that began as a formal experiment in subtraction arrived somewhere simpler and truer - an ode to peak experiences and the wisdom of childhood, the way a child knows, without being told, what pure goodness feels like.

Unidentified Phenomena

2026
Archival ink and acrylic paint marker on cotton rag paper
55.9 × 55.9 cm (22 × 22 in), unframed

This piece brings the methodology of “Roswell2223” (2023) - the artist’s largest hand-drawn work - into the scale of the regular practice for the first time. It is built in four alternating layers on cotton rag paper: a gradient color field of translucent parallel ink lines, a layer of white, a second layer of color, and finally a white structure in acrylic paint marker. Cotton rag paper can only absorb so much pigment, and this piece sits at that limit - the colors are as saturated as the paper will physically allow. Two systems of geometry share the surface: the background is strictly linear, drawn in tight brush-pen lines that fuse into solid fields of molten color, while the white structure above works on octagonal angles - smaller octagons nested into larger ones, their vertices connected by lines that simulate energetic pathways, straight segments accumulating into circular form. The composition is hung on the diamond, so the white figure reads as a plus rather than an X - elongated, rising. The result is an energetic system frozen in a moment of pure potential suspended over a ground burning at full capacity - no telling what happens next.

Power Nap

2026
Graphite on cotton rag paper
Octagonal: approx. 15.2 cm (6 in) tall, unframed

Made in the weeks after “Unidentified Phenomena,” this small work takes that painting’s entire white structure and repeats it eight times: four aligned to the cardinal directions, four rotated forty-five degrees, their upper points forming the outer star while their lower halves interlace into the star within - a mega-structure assembled from a smaller one. It is also the artist’s first plot in lead pencil. Where the previous piece pushed cotton rag paper to its saturation limit, graphite dissolves the problem: with no ink to drain and constant pressure dialed into the nib, the machine could run without stopping, layer upon layer, and the medium accumulates toward atmosphere rather than opacity. Over the years, the pencil layers will slowly soften into an ever hazier system - a drawing designed to keep becoming itself. The whole structure hovers inside a drawn octagon, a geometry that recurs throughout the artist’s work and that his grandfather - a geometric artist for over fifty years - spent decades trying to decode from within the constraints of the grid. Working digitally, the artist can now do what earlier tools never allowed: place octagons exactly, connect their vertices, and build structures from structures. That is what this piece quietly announces: the white structure of “Unidentified Phenomena,” complete and unaltered, has become a unit - a new molecule in the visual language, tested here at roughly six inches tall, and already beginning to combine.

Yoga Nidra

2026
Graphite on cotton rag paper
Shaped sheet: approx. 16.5 × 33 cm (6.5 × 13 in), unframed

Plotted immediately after its predecessor, this work begins to combine. Three four-fold versions of the molecule - reaching only in the cardinal directions this time - are chained across the sheet, and the linking is done without illusion: where two units meet, they reach for the same octagon and share it, each bond a genuine piece of common structure rather than an overlap. The surprise lives in between - new shapes emerge at the junctions that belong to neither unit alone, geometry the molecule never contained until it held hands with another. The graphite keeps everything at a whisper: layer upon layer of unbroken pencil line, silvery and atmospheric, destined to soften further with time. After plotting, the sheet was cut to an elongated hexagon - an unconventional shape meant to sit on a wall with significance beyond its size. One molecule became a chain. The chain is not the end of it.

Good Night's Sleep

2026
Graphite on cotton rag paper
25.4 × 50.8 cm (10 × 20 in), unframed

The sequence concludes at scale: the molecule, having chained, now grows into a lattice. Beginning at the center and expanding outward by the established bonding rules - adjacent units always reaching for, and sharing, the same octagon - the structure accumulates into a great diamond of graphite, its connectivity made visible as tone: where the bonds pile up, the drawing darkens. But this is not pure emergence. The system was allowed to do what it wanted, and the artist trimmed what was extra - removing units to reveal the lines beneath, letting partial molecules and three-fold variants stand among the whole ones, composing the silhouette by subtraction. Cultivated growth: rules below, judgment above. The lattice frays deliberately at its points, single units still reaching outward - because the logic has no natural stopping point, and the drawing simply chooses one.

$Late Summer$

Late Summer

2026
Archival ink on cotton rag paper
25.4 × 35.6 cm (10 × 14 in), unframed

“Late Summer” is drawn in the NN Pixel language in eight colors of archival ink - but with a thicker 0.8 mm nib and an ink selection new to the pixel works on paper. The unfamiliar inks sit against each other in unfamiliar ways: in places the layers trick the eye, conjuring texture and dimensionality from a flat weave of lines, the field reading almost as embroidered cloth. The edges tell the system’s secret. Within each pixel, filler lines run toward vertices that lie beyond the visible cell - ordinarily cropped mid-journey by the composition’s boundary. Here, at the field’s outer rim, they are left exposed, streaming outward toward destinations that never arrive: the weave showing its threads. A companion to “Early Fall,” the piece holds the other side of the same seam in the year - the deep crimsons and violets of an early evening in late summer, the hour when the heat softens and the first lights come on.

Early Fall

2026
Archival ink on cotton rag paper
20.3 × 35.6 cm (8 × 14 in), unframed

This piece continues the NN Pixel language begun with Series 1 in 2018 and developed since through works like “Interstellar Interstate,” Series 9, and “A Portal Behind a Waterfall.” Since the language moved to the plotter, the pixels have been layered ever more heavily; this field is triple-layered - each layer a set of bursting rays at a different angle, so every pixel becomes a small interference of light - in eight colors of archival ink: red, orange, blue, navy, fresh green, deep green, burgundy, and black. The colors follow a strict rule of succession: a sequence is set, and each pixel advances one step on its neighbor, new colors emerging from the center and pushing the older ones outward, increment by increment. The field is a slow broadcast from its own heart. Looking back at the finished work, the artist recognized a drive upstate in early fall - the first foliage arriving through the green, just after rain, when every color on the hillsides looked sharp, crisp, and lit from within. The colors move through their field like autumn through a landscape.

New Peaks

2026
Archival ink on cotton rag paper
17.8 × 17.8 cm (7 × 7 in), unframed

For years, the circle resisted. Working by hand, every element had to be anchored to the grid, and the rotational compositions the artist wanted remained out of reach; working digitally, rotation became trivial, and the mandala opened. This piece mixes geometries to see what emerges: elements of the NN Pixel language, stripped down and arranged into the outline of a square, repeated in rotation to build the circular array - and threaded through it, a construction returning to the practice after years away: a straight line stepping across one axis as it steps down another, its successive positions accumulating into curvature - parabolic envelopes conjured entirely from straight lines. Drawn in two greens and a navy - a deliberate push into the cooler spectrum - the layers weave into something closer to botany than architecture: petals, sepals, a rosette closing on a small star. Part of a year-long pursuit of nature’s less decipherable geometry - symmetries made naturally weird, forms meant to read as super strange and super familiar at the same time.

Del

2026
Archival ink on cotton rag paper
16.5 cm (6.5 in) tall, unframed

The artist’s first triangle, “2020.11.13,” was drawn by hand and filled with parabolic envelopes - curves conjured from straight lines stitched between evenly stepped vertices. By hand, the construction fights you: the ruler laid down for each new line covers the very vertex it must connect to, so every connection is made half-blind, checked and rechecked. The envelopes were loved and then set aside; triangles continued - “RADAR” from “Duality” (2023) among them - but the curves did not return to the triangle until now, drawn by a machine that never loses sight of a vertex. As always, methodologies mix: the central twelve-pointed star belongs to the same radiant family as “Head in the Clouds” and “Raspberry Dreamsicle,” its twelve-fold symmetry nesting cleanly into the triangle’s three-fold grid - a grid the artist prizes for the bizarre shapes it yields. The triangle has always held a double meaning for the artist: delta, the symbol of change, and the yield sign, the shape of giving way - together, an emblem of embracing change. Researching the inverted form’s name led to “del” - which in Farsi, the artist’s mother language, means heart: not the organ, but the emotional and spiritual center of a person. At the center of this triangle’s geometry: a radiant core.