It might even sound trivial that art history consists of millions of little acts of speech – of paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations that become well-known or on the other hand remain unknown. They all together form a certain art historical manner of speaking, a certain grand conversation, which includes all of these million separate sentences or words, each of them standing for itself. It seems that Naima Neidre does not approach art on the level of a single sentence or a single piece of art, but she is striving to move to the starting point of the conversation. It is the return to the ultimate beginning, to the place where the first line is being drawn on the paper.

The pillars of Neidre’s creation have not changed in the course of time. Paper is being filled with an elaborate network of lines that sometimes enables some poetic figures to open up, sometimes the figures are formed by the maze itself. Neidre still belongs to these artists, who fend social reality and daily poetry off their creation, trying to create in art a stop for resting and a possibility to gather beauty. Symbols, which emerge here and there, do not capture existentialistic problems (death, love, evanescence), but are rather short stories within the work itself – simple and clear sentences that rather call upon the creation of free connections than to clear interpretation.

Still it seems that Neidre with her whole creation has a bigger and deeper question to answer. While being a brilliant drawer, it actually makes us wonder, why Neidre has chosen for the means of expression just a simple line – the basic (but not the most primitive!) means, from which starts the formation of all art historical sentences. Why does Neidre do so that we can only see on her works a thick maze, which leaves the impression that it is not the artist herself anymore, who controls the movement of the lines, but the line itself – one of the basic ideas of figurative art – is just moving on the paper. Couldn’t it sometimes happen that in the works by Neidre we see the development of the same art historical conversation, but the conversation opens in these works up itself. Or in other words: doesn’t it sometimes happen in Neidre’s case so that art starts itself again and again, right from the very beginning. The line is not burdened with the task to depict something, to shape something – it touches the paper every time anew and in a different manner. Here art says again its first words: the sincere, direct, exact ones.

Yes, we could end in this way – in a poetic manner. Or we could, if there did not exist a short story by Italo Calvino, which has a totally different ending. Mister Palomar is picking weeds on his tiny strip of lawn, when …
Mr. Palomar becomes abstracted in mind, he is not picking the weeds anymore, he is not thinking of the lawn: he is thinking of the Universe. He is trying to connect with the Universe all of his thoughts of the lawn. The Universe is like a regular and orderly outer space or like a chaotic proliferation. Maybe it is final but uncountable, not uniform within its borders, but still hiding other Universes within itself. The Universe – a cluster of planets, nebulae, thin dust, power fields, intersection points of fields, clusters of clusters …