Galerie Claude Lemand

Claude Lemand had pub­lished in 2006 the Shafic Abboud’s Monograph in French and in English. From March to August 2011, Claude Lemand curated and held the Shafic Abboud Retrospective in Paris at the Institut du monde arabe and pub­lished the Catalogue.

This exhi­bi­tion of Paintings and Lithographs (1959-2002) is organ­ised as an echo to the Shafic Abboud new Retrospective curated by Nadine Begdache and Saleh Barakat at the Beirut Exhibition Center, Lebanon.

Tom Laurent. “With an oeuvre full of light and colourful pic­to­rial flux, Shafic Abboud’s work had immersed itself within the trends of the most lib­eral abstrac­tion as early as the 1950s, from which derived an impas­sioned lyri­cism. Arriving in Paris in 1947, the Lebanese artist never forgot his roots. He was very attached to his native country and trav­elled to Lebanon reg­u­larly. Abboud’s work can be described as a syn­cretism between western moder­nity, having seized its mag­ni­tude with the new Ecole de Paris to which he adhered, and the ori­ental prism emerging from Byzantine Greco-Arab places of wor­ship. He was seduced by Bonnard’s inte­rior scenes ema­nating light and more­over by Nicolas de Staël’s aes­thetic. Abboud grad­u­ally aban­doned the fig­u­ra­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion, which was still very much pre­sent in his works, giving way to his own, omit­ting sub­ject mat­ters yet duly rec­og­niz­able. In Shafic Abboud’s oeuvre, his mature works are those which com­bine both per­sonal expe­ri­ence and abstract tech­nique. He explained in 1979 that, `there is a visual trigger coming from a real-life event in the gen­esis of each painting’. Deceased in 2004, Abboud said that he worked as a `story-teller’.” (Tom Laurent, in Art Absolument, March/April 2011).

Translated from French by Valérie Hess.