 Samir
Abi Rached
Biographie
Diplômes
et prix:
- Diplôme
d'Etudes Supérieures en dessin et peinture de l'Académie
Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) ainsi qu'à l'atelier Alexandre
Kalomittzef, Beyrouth.
- Diplôme de l'Ecole ABC de Paris
- Sociétaire au Musée Sursok
- Prix de "l'Emir Fakhreddine", Beyrouth en 1977
- Prix "La voile Dorée Biennale", Koweit 1981
- Prix "Couronne de Laurier", en 1984
Expositions
individuelles:
- Gallery One
- Centre Art
- Galerie Forum (Paris)
- Musée Folklore National (Rome)
- Gallery Gab Center, Platform International (Washington, D.C.)
- Formes Gallery (Tokyo)
Expositions
collectives:
- International
Hotel (Bahrain)
- Al Majlis Art Gallery (Dubai)
- Musée National (Koweit)
- Musée des Arts Plastiques (Sharjah)
Article:
Samir Abi Rached, a painter ahead of his time by Jean-Claude
Morin, Paris 1997
Like all exceptional
painters, Samir Abi Rached is hard to define. It’s even more difficult
at first sight, even if we were tempted, to consider him a surrealistic
painter. From the surrealism, he has all the characteristics: the
spontaneity of “writing”, the unusual aspect of sight, freedom left
according to the chances of associations.
The conception
of his paintings doesn’t seem premeditated; it is visible that at
the moment of creation, the imagination has prevailed over all other
abilities and because of that, the surrealists claim that he’s one
of them. But the use of the word “surrealism” awakes in the spirit
a bundle of influences and references, which we are accustomed to
seek from the Occident, and that would risk enclosing the paintings
of Samir Abi Rached inside an inappropriate grid.
In fact, if
Samir Abi Rached testifies to something, it’s the presence of a
collective unconscious that no frontier could delimit and that he
could have given it his oriental color.
However, we
quickly notice that the images of the unconscious, which Breton
wishes for “without destination”, reach this painter in an intense
awareness of reality to which they bring a hallucinating illumination.
Therefore, Samir
Abi Rached is truly a painter ahead of his time: even though he
formulates a diagnosis of the most severe, he projects the vision-
compensating vision, reassuring vision that fills up the abyss with
a very lucid look. Therefore we understand the presence, in most
paintings, of those “gaps” towards a better world, of those beautiful
spaces towards Dawn that maybe no longer has the rose fingers of
the Odyssey but baby hands.
Over there,
in Samir Abi Rached, it’s a reflection, a citadel, a promise. It
is also the project itself of the painter: to help us see, through
a hideous reality, the soft appearance of the distance.
The real and
the imaginary, formerly two fighting brothers, are blending from
now on, they are melting in a strange marriage to give birth for
a new being, similar to this sea, always repainted in the landscapes
of Samir Abi Rached, and which is able to carry the cry of those
drowning, as well as to deliver the hope of those saved on the new
shores. After the flood, we see and hear nothing but the sea, but
this time it has joined the land, forming with it a marvelous break
in front of which mankind exclaims.
To a question
asked by a poet, to know if the “beautiful today” will end up blowing
away all soarings, all impetus that have failed to pull away from
the birdlime of reality, Samir Abi Rached replies with an act of
faith. Yet, from this reality, with a palette all bristling with
harshness, severities and asperities, he narrated the drama and
the traps. The immense serenity of the shores is threatened by the
index forever erecting of the mountains, or by the severed but constantly
growing and constantly voracious neck of a flora similar to the
Lernaean Hydra. Odd are the relationships like those maintained
by the man and the woman in this adventure: It’s to whom to retain
the other in their nets or their cavities.
Define Samir
Abi Rached? This attempt is even more difficult, once we have accompanied
this painter in his journey. If we say he is a painter, and of high
stature, because he has visions, terrific and splendid visions,
we would not be defining him; we would be underestimating the truth.
Je ne m'y attendais pas, 100 x 120 cm, Huile
Article
by William MATAR
This
artist was born in Beirut in 1947 and with the cultural background
of the time painting was one of the few Christian crafts still possible.
There was a complete break as the historical chain connecting eastern
Christendom with the theology underlying images being interrupted.
Abi Rached received his basic instruction in the studio of Alexandre
Kalomitzeff, producing at first chromos which however gave little
satisfaction. The painter has to paint as he can in his ambient
society, but he also wants to work for an ideal in his imagination.
Abi Rached wanted to return to a figurative style of painting, following
the influence exerted by surrealism. To express what he saw, Abi
Rached felt he could do without surrealist exaggeration and its
great detail, forgetting that by definition the unconscious is a
lure. So rather than one with a vision he appears simply as a skilled
craftsman on account of his basic formation, his understanding of
surrealism and his way of placing himself in the socio-cultural
context of painting in Lebanon. He worked as best he could in the
mystical surrealism of the review Planète, as other forms
of realism could do little to ensure his reputation. Rather than
from the history of art, his personal surrealism came from his own
interpretation of an interior world, with realism born of precision
that gave pictorial value. Each element of his vision has its own
independent particularity, and one is drawn towards details whose
disparity often stands in the way of the global view. His designs
show great technical precision as literary presentations and paintings
which apparently are his only way of following the European surrealist
current of the ‘sixties.
An element in French-speaking Lebanese society echoed this, leading
to a wave of photo-lithographs of Salvador Dali representing a revolt
which seemed to correspond to the beginning of the liberation of
Lebanese society, even though it might seem too easy to analyze
the work of Abi-Rached through a lack of coordination of references
and of history. Speaking of an arbitrary choice of influences would
mean further retreat into the illusion of an ideal image supposed
to serve as a model, whereas in fact the artist must be accepted
for what he is.
By its technique for representing and figuring, surrealism in fact
was for Abi-Rached’s generation a final echo of an understanding
of the image freed from the weight or the incidents of culture.
It failed to understand that Breton was a faithful disciple of Gustave
Moreau, and that for him the marvel came from the accumulated jewels
on the neck of Herodiade. By its literary element, surrealist imagery
became a common rhetoric and sent back the echo of its fine detail
and technical ability. The greatest irony lay in that visual strangeness
proved the difficulty of a precise existence that could not be realized
in Lebanese culture.
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Some of the artist's Artwork
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