Galerie Claude Lemand

SHAFIC ABBOUD. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL. Paintings, 1960-2000.

Lydia Harambourg.

The lumi­nous con­fi­dence. A painting of effu­sion : Shafic Abboud shows a group of small-scale works spread out over forty years. From the paint­ings of the six­ties until the most recent ones, we note his ongoing lumi­nous con­quest through the use of coloured mate­rials. His palette remem­bers ori­ental riches and lightens up until we see the emer­gence of com­bi­na­tions of yellow, orange and red, of blue and violet fil­tering the light. Abboud trans­poses reality. He dives into it to immerse him­self, to bring back a frag­mented his­tory onto the canvas. Here we have a piece of fabric, else­where a tree, a tiling for which he dis­covers a linear and coloured equiv­a­lence. It is as though the painter fil­tered colour, as well as per­fumes, sounds. Whether it is in his studio beside the Montsouris Park where he has worked since 1951 or the one along the Loire, he searches his memory until he comes across his sub­ject. His painterly nar­ra­tive is fil­tered equally by visual emo­tions as by the pic­to­rial work, ample and ardent, con­cen­trated. More lit­erate in the begin­ning, his sub­jects were pro­gres­sively « devoured » by the light cir­cu­lating inside those labyrinthine spaces. Working in series, his Chambres, his Nuits, the sea, the gar­dens, the female body, move across the can­vases like shim­mering jewels, in har­monic sound sequences or con­fi­den­tially. Sometimes sub­jected to a lumi­nous sat­u­ra­tion, some­times absorbed by dark­ness, his pig­ments mixed with egg are inter­min­gled thanks to the action of a brush that lets through coloured intox­i­ca­tions, reveals the essence of things, their poetry. At the cross­roads of two civ­i­liza­tions, Abboud has adapted the pas­sage of time, in order to attain his lan­guage’s fun­da­mental unity, the one pro­vided by light, space and by a chro­matic plen­ti­ful­ness.