As one would expect of Birza, he explores painting’s versatility using whatever visual resources present themselves. Who says his work is ‘abstract’? Or insists that it is ‘figurative’? He shrugs off such labels. This new cycle, Shifting Systems, demonstrates yet again that for Birza, painting holds out the prospect of limitless opportunities.

Those who conclude that these constructions are a radical departure from the ostensibly compelling figuration of the Arab scenes have been misled. Birza himself sows the confusion quite deliberately, partly by the title he has given this series. Nothing is what it seems. Modern painters have long abandoned the categories and divisions that were once devised to help us, the viewers, grasp what we were looking at. What matters, ultimately, is shaping thoughts. From this perspective, the Arab scenes and these new constructions are as figurative as they are abstract, and within Birza’s oeuvre they are more of a logical consequence than a radical shift in style.

Birza is strongly attracted to the mutability of thoughts and images. Destruction and construction play an important part in this. Little by little, Birza dismantles the accumulated expectations of painting, before using the remains to build up something new that is as self-explanatory as it is unexpected. As in earlier series, the foreground and background are subtly played off against one another. The patterns dominating the foreground, which have been painted with the utmost concentration, appear to be the most abstract part of the image. But unlike the background, they can be resolved into existing, figurative sources. The background, on the other hand, is associative, mutable, and painted with a hallucinatory palette. The contrast between foreground and background could scarcely be greater, and yet both are equally abstract, in the sense that neither bears the slightest relationship to the visible reality. This sophisticated interaction produced a field of tension that will amaze and perplex the viewer: the ingenuity displayed here goes to the very core of the problem of painting.

That Birza is unconcerned about the historical perspective of modern art is clear from the series of ceramic objects on circular bases, entitled It is all metamorphoses/It is all about love, exhibited at the same time as the paintings. The use of exaggeration as a visual resource leaves viewers bewildered by the sight of these ‘direct’ images, some of them horrifying and others comical. It would be best not to take them too literally. Nor should you try too hard to find links with Eastern pictorial culture, though it is certainly tempting to do so. It is not their specific manifestations that immediately define these objects as art, so much as the artist’s basic attitude, of seeking to appropriate everything within his reach and to manipulate it such that what cannot be named must be art.