Enter the world of Noma Bar, and you are bound for a voyage into a purely visual world inhabited by pictograms, symbols, animals and caricatures. As the eyes wander across and delve into the imagery, Bar’s hidden messages slowly reveal themselves, implicating a multitude of topics from popular opinions and world politics and more easy-going themes of social interaction and saucy erotic encounters.

Like a Rorschach inkblot, renowned in psychology for fractal black-ink splashes used to test how an image is perceived, Bar brilliantly weaves multiple images into one composition. A pin-up girl rendered in a model pose with the bust, waist and hips squeezed into a little black dress formed as the head of the old-fashioned pin, exploiting the narrow space between her legs to envision the pointy end; and a two-colour yellow and black portrait of the Iranian president with a missile as the nose and eyes shaped from its tail fins. In the latter work of Ahmadinejad, and like all the artist’s portraits of well-known figures, the subject’s recognisable features are merged with symbols that epitomise their notoriety or fame.

Controversial as some topics may seem, Bar’s compositions make their point in an efficient and humourous manner, never straying too far into danger-filled territory and always delivering the message with a grandmother’s decency; as once delightfully described by the American author Tom Wolfe.

Far from all the artist’s subject matter are dedicated to serious-minded themes, and some are simply light-hearted graphical interactions that will capture the spirit of a moment. Full Bodied 1 and Full Bodied 2 are classic examples of Bar’s sense of good fun and humour. The art-deco inspired colour schemes, in white, yellow, turquoise and black, depict the chemistry between two people in different scenes. In Full Bodied 1 the two are engaged in a close conversation. Most noticeable is the person to the left, seen in profile with a defined shape of a nose, the black hair and right shoulder in white. From here, the second person reveals herself more slowly, observed opposite in a warm sunray colour, standing in a white backless dress as she holds her arm around the man. In the negative space - the space around an object or figure - a half-full wine glass appears between them; a symbol of easy conversation and a relaxed social interaction.

Compared to the more abstract appearance of Full Bodied 1, in the second work, Full Bodied 2, the different images reveal themselves more quickly. The body of an undressed woman with an exposed breast, and in the left-side a face of a second person, checking the bouquet of the wine in the wine glass, revealed in the negative space between the legs of the woman. It is a multi-layered image, displaying different connected stories within one single image; the negative space in one image becomes the positive of another, which again provide the contours of a third image - and so forth. In both works, the characters and wine glasses play to the title of works - referencing to full-bodied wine - reminding the viewer of the artist’s extraordinary capacity for witty, lateral thinking.

The ingenious compositions by Bar starts in his sketchbook where ideas are first conceived and drafted by hand. From these pages they are transferred to the screen and processed digitally; curves are perfected, lines are straightened and proportions aligned. It is in the process of digital layering, that the artist applies the narrow colour palette and sharpens the negative and positive space, striving to reach ‘maximum communication with minimum effort’; a creative mantra of the artist. The simplicity in the communication is what makes the works of Noma Bar remarkable.

Forming part of an annual exhibition in the Lutyens member’s club in London, Full Bodied 1 and Full Bodied 2 were released through a collaboration between Noma Bar, Lutyens and Eyestorm. The pair of three-colour screenprints are each an edition of 50, signed and numbered on front.

You can find more information about Full Bodied 1 and Full Bodied 2, and see them in more detail, on Noma Bar’s artist page here.