News

27 February 2015

SHAFIC ABBOUD . The Armory Show 2015 + Art Dubai Modern 2015.

SHAFIC ABBOUD. Masterpieces from 1958 to 2002.
The Claude Lemand Gallery held 15 solo shows of works from different periods and aspects of Shafic Abboud’s Art. Claude Lemand wrote and published analysis on Shafic Abboud’s personality, works and influence, published his Monograph in 2006, curated his Retrospective in 2011 in Paris, at the Institut du Monde Arabe, published the Catalogue, and initiated in 2012 his Retrospective in the Beirut Exhibition Center.

Shafic Abboud: ‘I only stop when both colour and light match. I cannot escape from colour, it is my fate and nature - my eyes must have been dazzled for ever. The impact between two colours creates light.’ (May 1982).

Shafic Abboud, by Emmanuel Daydé.
‘Where will we go when the lights go out and we gather all together?’, asked the feisty American-Lebanese poetess and painter Etel Adnan. ‘We will all go to Paradise’ seems to be the answer of her contemporary Shafic Abboud, whose paintings that are inebriated with light, woven with colours like carpets, enclosed like the Garden of Eden and rustling like Persian miniatures, appear as transfigured visions of an intangible reality. It seems that his entire oeuvre follows some of the Bonnardian aspects of the joie de vivre, as is proven through the title of one of his paintings, Cette place pour le Bonheur (‘That space for happiness’). Abboud remains a mystical believer of the moment, who is capable of sacrificing everything to this wild god. With his troubled nature, the Levantine artist desperately fights against time that consumes us and against depression that threatens him. He does this by making his canvases flutter and vibrate with a fire that burns, warms up and consumes itself, using all sorts of yellow, orange and red colour variations from the complex East.

There are some aspects of a meticulous alchemist in this magician of colours, as is proven throughout his books of paintings or his notebooks covered with sentences neatly framed, similar to some form of patchwork that is to be read as well as being looked at. There is also the notion of a musician lost in the harmony of spheres in this man crazy about Beethoven’s quartets. The latter supposedly possessed ‘the gift of perpetual migration’, according to his friend André Boucourechliev, the composer. For example, in his Quatuor (‘Quartet’) of 1977, Abboud’s painting is never still as there is always movement, sparkling, passion, iridescence. Finally, there is a mystical approach to the flesh in this wounded hedonist, who wants to ‘look at Nature straight in the eyes’ and who paints nudes like landscapes and landscapes like nudes on the ceiling. Born in the Greek Orthodox village of Mhaidsé in 1926, at the heart of the Lebanese mountains, Abboud the sensualist painter remained a maker of icons all his life, these ‘splendors of light and beauty, glorious with liquid gold’, as the poet of the two riverbanks, Georges Schehadé, called them. Although he moved away from his childhood memories when he settled down in France, next to the enchanted garden of the Montsouris park, and that he ended up rejecting the confessional politics that sparked the fire in Lebanon, he never stopped sanctifying the secular between Beirut and Paris, painting here ‘where the heat is appeasing’ during the summer, and there, ‘where the temperature brings the brain to a boil’ during the winter.

As the paths of modernity were inscrutable, that of Post-War abstraction only served him as a way of cultivating his garden by irrigating the tradition of new lights. Just ten years before he passed away, he wanted to see again the Greek Orthodox monastery of Saidnaya one more time. Located on the Syrian foothills of the Anti-Lebanon, his mother used to take him on pilgrimages when he was a child to go see one of the three paintings depicting the Virgin Mary and attributed to Saint Luke. From his fascination with icons - and hence from Siennese painting, stemming from the latter - Abboud preserved the idea of not representing the world around us but rather transfiguring it. Even when he doesn’t use the deep and absolute matt of tempera, he employs light and pure colours, from which emerge his hypothetical figures in a static and frontal way, illuminating them from within (and not from behind, as in the black Midi works of his friend Marfaing). There is no better example that alludes to the theory of saints in Orthodox deism than his painting of his golden brown Ladies of the gallery of 1977 – without mentioning his series on Simone’s dress or the full-length portrait of a Saudi woman, titled Widad Dress. Even when all figural traces seem to have disappeared, the child of the mountain pursues his visions in ecstasies of colours: ‘The collision of two colours provokes light… Colour, I will never escape from it, it is a fatality, it is my nature’, he used to say; ‘my eyes must have been dazzled forever’.

Even if it was only a way into his later oeuvre, the moving poetic figuration of his paintings from 1947 to 1953 heralds a universe of dreams that are already compartmentalized, through soft grey colour tones, almost transparent. He uses a folkloric construction, similar to that of Zoran Music’s small Dalmatian horses. His slender and dreamlike strokes are borrowed from Paul Klee, whilst the little secret stories that the Fous or La boîte à images tell each other refer to the happy childhood days, when young Shafic was like a bird, living off clean air and fresh water by absorbing the stories that his grandmother used to tell him. Yet there is no need to begin such an ordinary narration in the Paris of the 1950s that strives to forget the horrors of the war through the regeneration of abstract art. Although he fundamentally rejects its components, the Lebanese painter adheres to the lyrical Abstraction praised by critic Roger van Gindertael and applies an integral abstraction in the same way as Poliakoff, finding the inner realm he sought for in the Russian artist’s combinations of silent shapes. However, he complicated these sensorial, and here again iconic puzzles, by building them with stacks of colours, just like in his dense cycle of the Saisons (‘Seasons’) dated 1959, depicting an imaginary muddy topography that foreshadows Eugène Leroy’s rotten magmatic Saisons. Far from being a Middle-Eastern epigone, Abboud is a discoverer. If we attribute the invention of the ‘black-light’ to Pierre Soulages, then we need to attribute the invention of the ‘colour-light’ to Shafic Abboud, considering his skill in making his canvas colourless through the use of colours. As in the art of manuscript illuminations, he knows how to extend his monochrome neutral figures through coloured images. Yet the empty space of abstract art, that approaches strict geometry, was beginning to suffocate him. A painting such as Enfantine of 1964 tacitly echoes the luminous composition of Nicolas de Staël’s Méditerrannée.

At the same time as creating his abstract religious school, he illustrated fairy-tales for his daughter Christine as well as producing a magical lantern in the shape of a cinema-box, that shows movies that are as still as the Quay Brothers’ short animation films. ‘I do not oppose abstract painting against figurative painting’, de Staël claimed to his accusers, ‘A painting should be simultaneously abstract and figurative. Abstract for acting like a wall, figurative as being a representation of space’. This space is what Abboud wants to conquer from that point onward, taking something caused by reality as the starting point to then be blurred in the great Baroque carpets gleaming with colours, or, on the contrary, in the whiteness of immaculate snow or the dullness of minimal night. Then, the entire world wears clothes worthy of the Thousand and One Nights, whether it be in the shimmering fabrics of the Saint Pierre market, his mother’s blue-stained stretched out dead body, Merce Cunningham’s Zen performance at the Fondation Maeght, the nostalgic memory of Paradise on Beirut’s beach, the children’s beds in the room, the fields surrounding his little house on the Loire river banks or the ultimate monochrome beaches, ‘so soft that they can be touched with the eyes’.

In a time where there becomes here, when the Museum of Modern Art of Paris is getting ready to dedicate a large exhibition to Iranian artistic creation and the Pompidou Centre is featuring Arab informal abstraction in its show entitled Modernités plurielles, it is only natural to turn towards Modern Lebanese Art and its solitary pioneers, headed by Saliba Douaihy and Shafic Abboud. Being the only Arab artist who showcased his works at the First Biennial of Paris in 1959 - exhibiting side by side to Yves Klein, Martin Barré, André Marfaing and Joan Mitchell - Abboud succeeded in escaping from the Second School of Paris, by breathing into his luminous and formal conquests an oriental incandescence, that is as dazzling as it is unexpected.

Translated from French by Valérie Hess.

Claude Lemand:
‘Shafic Abboud is one of the foremost Arab Artists of the 20th century. His paintings are a manifesto for freedom, colour and light, as well as being a permanent bridge between the art of Europe and the Middle East. He was very attached to Lebanon, to its landscapes, its light and his own childhood memories. He was from a Lebanese Arab Modern culture, strongly influenced by the stories of his grandmother, the paintings of the travelling story-tellers and by the Byzantine icons. The writings of the Arab Nahda were to later have a significant impact on his intellectual education. (…) Born in 1926 in Lebanon, Shafic Abboud arrived in 1947 in Paris. He blended in perfectly with the city’s artistic life, just as many other artists who had come from all over the world after 1945. He was the only artist from the Arab World to participate to the first Biennale of Paris in 1959. He played in Lebanon, before 1976 and after 1993, a major role for Beirut’s cultural and artistic life. (…). His mature works are ‘transfigurative’, because of Abboud’s search for a synthesis between his fairy-tale like childhood world and his technical mastering of abstract Parisian painting. He transfigured images filtered from his memory into painting, such as his series of Destroyed Cafés of 1990. These large colourful compositions beam the tragic reality of the war in Lebanon devastating the cafés by the sea in Beirut. (…).’ (January 2011).

Available Books :
SHAFIC ABBOUD. Monograph, Paris, 2006. First book researched and published by Claude Lemand, 368 pages in colour, 25 x 33,5 cm. ISBN 2-910263-06-1.

SHAFIC ABBOUD. Catalogue, Paris, 2011. Researched and published by Claude Lemand, in conjunction with the retrospective at the IMA, 72 pages in colour, 25 x 34 cm. ISBN 2-910263-07-2.

25 February 2024

Manabu KOCHI. Spring Artist.

2 November 2022

BAYA. Femmes en leur Jardin

13 March 2022

ALGERIA MY LOVE. Artists of the Algerian fraternity, 1953-2021 - Exhibition from March 18 to July 31, 2022.

24 June 2020

I.M.A.gination - CHRISTIE’S PARIS - Online Charity sale. From June 24 to July 16, 2020.

12 June 2020

THE ARTIST MAHJOUB BEN BELLA PASSED AWAY IN JUNE 11, 2020.

8 April 2020

The Circle of Friends of GUERMAZ pays tribute to Pierre REY.

4 March 2020

PHOTOS + VIDEOS FROM THE LEMAND DONATION.

16 February 2020

ZINEB SEDIRA WILL REPRESENT FRANCE AT THE VENICE BIENNALE 2021.

30 August 2019

VLADIMIR VELICKOVIC PASSED AWAY ON AUGUST 28, 2019.

10 August 2019

KAMAL BOULLATA (Jerusalem, 1942 - Berlin, 2019) buried in his homeland JERUSALEM.

28 January 2019

DIA AL-AZZAWI, Bilâd al-Sawâd (Black Land) - LE MONDE, 28.01.2019

22 October 2018

A PASSION TO SHARE. The CLAUDE & FRANCE LEMAND DONATION of 1300 artworks to the Institut du monde arabe MUSEUM, Paris.

29 August 2018

NUIT BLANCHE 2018 - YOUSSEF ABDELKE - A DONATION TO FIGHT DEATH IN SYRIA. - Institut du monde arabe, Museum. - 6 OCTOBER 2018.

25 May 2018

ETEL ADNAN - Exhibition from June 15, to October 7, 2018. - ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE, Bern, Switzeland.

16 May 2018

ABDALLAH BENANTEUR, THE SONG OF THE EARTH. Retrospective-Tribute. Exhibition from June 9, to September 9, 2018.

1 March 2018

AZZAWI, SABRA AND SHATILA. Exhibition from April 11 to September 16. 2018. - Musée. Institut du Monde arabe, Paris.

4 February 2018

PICASSO, GUERNICA. - Musée national Picasso-Paris.

22 January 2018

PORTRAIT OF THE-NON-EXISTENT-BIRD. Maison des Arts, ANTONY.

14 January 2018

ABDALLAH BENANTEUR PASSED AWAY ON 31 DECEMBER 2017.

12 June 2017

TONDO INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION - City of Issoudun Museum - France.

7 August 2016

DIA AL-AZZAWI TO LAUNCH RETROSPECTIVE IN DOHA.

24 February 2016

SEGUÍ, PAINTING IN MIRRORS. Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch, ISSOUDUN. From 27 February to 22 May 2016.

30 September 2015

MAHJOUB BEN BELLA, WORKS ON PAPER. La Piscine Museum, Roubaix, France. 24 OCTOBER 2015 - 31 JANUARY 2016

24 September 2015

FATIMA EL-HAJJ, THE SONG OF THE EARTH.

18 September 2015

MANABU KOCHI . Art Paris Art Fair 2015 .

18 September 2015

KEVORK MOURAD . Art Paris Art Fair 2015 - Mucem 2015 .

18 September 2015

ABDALLAH BENANTEUR . Art Dubai Modern 2015 - Booth M7 .

27 February 2015

SHAFIC ABBOUD . The Armory Show 2015 + Art Dubai Modern 2015.

25 February 2015

THE AL-AZZAWI EPIC . New York. The Armory Show 2015.

7 November 2014

ETEL ADNAN, Writing Mountains. Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Retrospective, 15 Nov. 2014 - 08 March 2015.

1 September 2014

GERD LANGE DESIGN. In the Context of Serial production. 1962-2007.

3 July 2014

ISSOUDUN - Musée de l’Hospice Saint Roch - Conversation between Claude Lemand and Tom Laurent - Art Absolument - July 2014

21 May 2014

City of ISSOUDUN - PORTRAIT OF THE NON-EXISTENT-BIRD - Exhibition from 22 May to 31 August 2014 .

8 May 2014

ETEL ADNAN AND THE ARAB MODERNITY .

19 March 2014

YOUSSEF ABDELKE - 2 EXHIBITIONS IN PARIS : GRAND PALAIS + GALERIE CLAUDE LEMAND

9 March 2014

TONDO INTERNATIONAL - ART BAHRAIN - ART PARIS ART FAIR 2014

10 January 2014

SHAFIC ABBOUD, THE PROPHET .

28 October 2013

ABDALLAH BENANTEUR. The River and the Volcano. Text by Claude Lemand.

16 October 2013

BENANTEUR, Paintings. LA GAZETTE DROUOT. Exhibitions by Lydia Harambourg.

5 March 2013

Grand Palais - Art Paris Art Fair - C21 Galerie Claude Lemand - 27 mars - 1er avril 2013. Dia Al-Azzawi, Bilad al-Sawad & other works, 1978-2011.

15 November 2012

Claude Lemand. A Passion to share.

20 May 2011

Spring in Paris, next year in Beirut.

Copyright © Galerie Claude Lemand 2012.

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