Omar
Onsi, The Gardener of Epiphanies -PAGE 4-
(Photo showing Onsi admiring his sculpture by Youssef Hoyeck, around 1965) - Article copyrighted 1985, The council of the Foreign Economic relations.
Kurd Women in Beirut, pastel, 48 x 63 cm, collection Dr, Hassan Rifai
Cyr went on to write: «I arrived, I had my car unloaded in the mild sunshine, and off I drove along the first road I encountered. As I later learned, this was the road to Sidon, and three I remember I had the joy, after criss-crossing the humpbacked alleyways, of coming upon the little port where fisherman squatting on coils of rope were tossing shuttles through the torn meshes of their nets. They chatted, joked and laughed as they worked, but I of course knew nothing of their language. I was moved nevertheless to smile, but not at their jests: I was smiling at that magnificent sunshine of Lebanon which quite stunned me – but was good enough to extend me its friendly welcome throughout the first days of my new life. […] Form an indescribable mass of humanity there darted back and forth, yelling, running, grabbing each other, some dozens perhaps hundreds of children, clothed in an unbelievable assortment of colors, a patchwork of reds, yellows, greens and other hues. Here and there came into view the outline of a woman in a white shawl, a colored apron and a long thick grown that swept up clouds of dust from the wayside […] it all dazzled and enchanted me. Like a real tourist, I was seduced by all those Oriental frills that, drenched in sunlight, seem to burst into all the colors of a marvelous picture. Later, I was to set aside those deluding fripperies in order to get at the real soul of Lebanon , and still wonder at its supple fascination – but that is another story.”
Camels at the drinking through, oil, 80 x 99 cm, collection Dr. Hassan Rifai
Yes, the surface charm of that Lebanon was so powerful that Onsi, like the other painters of his generation, had, you would think, merely to dip into what lay around him in order to grasp the element of his quest, his conquest. Quest for identity? Conquest of the world’s substance and secret? So easy was the relationship of the artist to his environment that it all seemed there within a hand’s grasp or at the tip of his brush. He simply had to breathe on the canvas or paper, let the color run over its white surface, for the signs of an unmistakable identity to appear and celebrate, brushstroke after stroke, the happiness of existence: in this eruption of anemones, those round soft peaches mauve from the mere pleasure of their dialogue with a pink and white tablecloth and a blue vase, those white-clad women seeming to swivel with their softy gleaming jars on their way back from the village fountain, that Bedouin woman (an inescapable subject at which all the painters of that time tried their hand) in whom, rather à la Manet with a touch of fauvism, the black hues of the turban are galvanized into self-assertion by the intense reds and blues of her costume, with her tattoo marks adding their note of green to the concert; then there are that admirably rhythmic aloe-bush carved out, as it were, by light against an almost linear background in which the outline of trees may be divined, the little fishing harbor on which night has already begun to cast its pall, embowered in a near-black blue wherein the debris of a recent sun lies near at hand in tints of violet, farther off in tints of yellow and red; then this bitter, bistre landscape lying prone before a distant sea swept by a lighter blue we know to be the sky; these two gazelles, reclining yet brightly alert with all the feminine charm of their refinement, and counter pointing the nearby ranks of aloes; these nudes as sensitive as if their soft tawny skins were receiving the light of earth’s first day; those studies in which the painter’s spontaneity in no way diminishes his gift of observation or innate sense of the finest nuance.
Two Gazelles, watercolor, 33 x 48 cm, collection Mr Samir Abillamah
The color of Onsi’s paintings is naively, arrestingly sensual. Welling up with a slightly muffled force, as if reluctant to break its tie with an inner secret, as if, nevertheless, it were the very substance of appearances, it seems to tear itself away in strips from a hidden energy that seeks to retain those strips in order, in time, to restore them to their pure vocation: that vocation being to vanish into the daydream of happiness that gave rise to them, so as to leave no room but for happiness, as happens when, at another level of artistic creation and in accordance with other parameters, one contemplates a life-saturated painting by Matisse.
The hind, watercolor, 31 x 47 cm, collection Mr. Jihad Abillamah
Onsi’s art eschews all excess, faithful as it is therein to the nature of its creator, to the very nature of the inspiration deployed, each quite simply – strangely – harmonious with each other. Indeed, “harmony” must be the keyword to defining the specific character of Onsi. You could call him a musician, for what it is worth to speak of one art in terms of another: a musician, in particular, in his use of watercolor. A would-be charmer of the blank sheet, conjuring up from it with infinite delicacy the tokens of a style, he remains happily to all the “given”, to that simple treasure of the landscape which has practically dissolved into the light – faithful also to all supple, spontaneously poetic figures: boats, girls, trees. Two strokes suffice this Onsi to enliven a pine tree-top with a caroling of pure color. This is a weightless Onsi, a son of air, the inventor of a new style of arabesque. The properties be borrows from music are the fluidity that distinguishes his work, the transparency of his resolutions, one might rather say their “crystallization”, a visible shrinking from over-statement whereby the invisible is enticed into expression. Indeed, the entire art of the watercolorist resides at the meeting-point of the temptations to crystallize – which cannot avoid some effect of “abstraction”, be it ever so small – and sensitivity to that enticement which demands a great degree of inner openness and response. That openness “furnishes” the blank sheet with empty spaces, spaces not merely blank but of a magnetic emptiness more pregnant than plenitude itself.
Olive-Picking, watercolor, 34 x 49 cm, collection Mr. Farouk Abillamah
Plenitude is the culmination of a long tradition of health. Is health a value in the plastic arts? Yes, replies the entire oeuvre of Omar Onsi. It is healthy as a plant or woman may be: more moving for being healthy in their innate delicacy. Their divined inner frailty becomes the more treasurable thereby.
Poppies, oil, 59 x 72.5 cm, collection H.E. Saeb Salam
When Omar Onsi died, on 3 June 1969 , there died with him a tender of the garden of epiphanies, a painter for whom Lebanon was a love story, and a poet whose colorful dreams belong to the most precious part of our heritage.
Saleh Stéitié
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