The works of the first period are characterized by the use of warm colors dominated by red, orange, yellow and black, and the depiction of compositions in which masses of figures occupy the entire surface plane.

[11] 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.

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.

the composition covers that space and all its cognitive illusions[16] 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.

"[22] 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.

[27] It is noted that “Nabil Kanso is the first Middle Eastern artist to surface outside, if not against the framework of colonialism.”[28] 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.

[39][40][41] In Venezuela, installations were featured as part of the Second Ibero-American Symposium held in Caracas in 1987,[42] the International Encounter for Peace in Mérida in 1988.

[45] Some critics point to a sense of entrapment[46] in which standing in the central space surrounded by Kanso’s 12-foot-high paintings is as close as you get to being in the middle of a fire.

[51] In 1985, Kanso exhibited a series of seven paintings that covered the walls of the gallery at Nexus Contemporary Art Center reflecting in the opinion of one reviewer “a monumental display of neo-expressionist horrors of war.”[52] "The horrors of war in Lebanon" an art critic wrote "have fueled the fires that burn in these very effective paintings,"[53] “In the face of horror,” remarked one critic, “there are only two courses: to circumscribe, create a bar, an absolute demarcation, to be “at one” with the confluence and to refuse to overcome it- or to obsess to the point of no return, to create a canvas the size and shape of the original, a one-to-one mapping of the real upon itself, which uses the body of the artist “in a transitive sense” across it.

And that is what is occurring in these paintings.”[54] A reviewer thought of the expressions as “a tapestry of souls, struggling, reaching for one another… painted jazz rhythms of naked spirits climbing an interminable Jacob’s ladder in a metaphorical conflagration which repulses and sucks us all in.