Galerie Claude Lemand

Shafic ABBOUD, The Taif Agreement, 1990.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hD7Ib­d4Mb­dMldM­SIohN­WwhUQ_AJ6aHor/view?usp=sharing
___

Christine Abboud:
Monumental sculp­ture, retracing in par­allel the artist’s life and cer­tain episodes in Lebanese his­tory, including the civil war that broke out in April 1975 and the Taif Accords of 1989-90 that marked its end.
His paternal grand­mother’s house in Mhaydsé near Bikfaya (Mount Lebanon), his youthful years, the tor­ments of adult­hood, the coming and destruc­tive war, then the glimpsed hopes...
Shafic Abboud remained unde­cided for a long time as to how to con­clude this opus. He chose, in a ges­ture that was as true to his per­son­ality as pos­sible, both serious and humorous, to pay homage to Piero della Francesca.
___

Anissa Bouayed: The Taif Agreement. Rebuilding Hope.

An artist firmly com­mitted to painting, Shafic Abboud also made forays into sculp­ture, ceramics, and tapestry. This was true of ter­ra­cotta, which he used in moments of despon­dency, such as the death of his friend, the artist Ida Karskaya, saying of that moment that, dev­as­tated by this loss, he could no longer paint. He also spent a summer, suf­fering from the fact that he would no longer return to Lebanon because of the war, in a moment of depres­sion and doubt, which he tran­scended by mag­nif­i­cently dec­o­rating around a hun­dred dishes pre­pared by his friends Marie and Gérard Khoury in their work­shop in Aix-en-Provence.

He also returns to the earth, at a time when a pos­sible peace seems to be taking shape in the Middle East, earth that he uses to model a work aston­ishing in many respects, enti­tled The Taif Agreement. He, who has evoked dis­lo­ca­tion and ruins in sev­eral works on the war, models here a long column 250 cm high, made of the stacking of eleven small cubic struc­tures, all dif­ferent from each other, some with ori­ental dec­o­ra­tion marked by arca­tures, others with more rec­ti­linear dec­o­ra­tion, more or less open­work, more or less blocked, some­times bearing ele­gant blue tem­pera paint­ings, or dec­o­rated with colon­nades or claustra, through which the light fil­ters, thus par­tic­i­pating in the work. Each of these super­im­posed mod­ules could be a "housing unit," if we use the lan­guage of the archi­tect Le Corbusier, because what appears first is not what at the top of the column could be a set of doc­u­ments sym­bol­izing the Agreement, but rather, this ele­gant super­po­si­tion of places that seem inhab­ited by life, in its very beauty and diver­sity. This sort of ver­tical city seems sus­pended on the promise of peace that The Taif Agreement con­tain.

This agree­ment, signed in October 1989 in Taif, Saudi Arabia, between Lebanese under the aus­pices of a tri­par­tite com­mittee including Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Algeria, were intended to put an end to fif­teen years of civil war. Although the agree­ments, because they agreed to see Syria remain the armed policeman of Lebanon, were decried by a sec­tion of Lebanese public opinion, Shafic Abboud sees them as the first major attempt to restore peace and make national rec­on­cil­i­a­tion pos­sible. He who refused, out of aver­sion to com­mu­ni­tar­i­anism, to con­tinue teaching in Beirut, divided into zones responding to con­fes­sional influ­ences, who always refused to sup­port one camp against the other, is delighted to imagine a uni­fied Lebanon. He rebuilds the country in his own way, he sym­bol­i­cally "rebuilds" it through this sort of totem, under whose tute­lary pro­tec­tion peace could come. There is here, as with the 5 JUNE trip­tych of the 1967 war, a strong sacred­ness in the ele­va­tion of this plastic form which seems to want to say, after so much destruc­tion, that the recon­struc­tion of a new Lebanon is pos­sible.

The work, which must be imag­ined as a patient, joyful but fragile achieve­ment, reveals a deep attach­ment to peace, which served the painter as a viaticum and com­pass in place of a polit­ical dis­course. He wants to bring to the event a cre­ative response. He chooses the min­eral mate­rial, earth, one of the four ele­ments, with all its Aristotelian sym­bolism as the con­sti­tu­tive root of the world. He shapes the clay, which implies a cer­tain ges­ture, he does not carve or remove mate­rial as in stone sculp­ture, but he gives birth with his hands, by mod­eling a flex­ible mate­rial that bends to his wishes, with which he pro­ceeds here by suc­ces­sive addi­tions, a new form sym­bol­izing peace. He opposes the war­mon­gers with this modern Tower of Babel, a del­i­cate work, euphoric in its ascent, attrac­tive in its careful ele­gance, yet vul­ner­able because it can easily be desta­bi­lized, broken, or fall to the ground, like unstable scaf­folding or a house of cards swept away with the back of a hand. Abboud thus gives it, through this dual imprint, and after so much destruc­tion, a moving dimen­sion.

It tes­ti­fies to a lucid aware­ness of the pre­car­ious polit­ical bal­ances that pre­vail in Lebanon’s des­tiny, but, as an act of cre­ation, it inscribes the artist’s desire to oppose this shifting reality that over­whelms him with the image of peace, as a desir­able pos­si­bility, a future within reach, which must be named or imag­ined for it to come about.