Article: Ali Chams - Segments of Nature Magically Take Shape

To Ali Chams, painting is play. Yet, this man to whom art is play spent 12 years learning how to paint. Four years at the Lebanese Institute of Fine Arts, five years at Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad and three years at the Higher School of Decorative Arts in Paris. Along the way, he also managed to acquire a degree in philosophy and psychology at the Arab University of Beirut.

Which is probably why in talking about art, Chams thinks along philosophical lines. Ask him why he paints, what he wants to express, and he'll go into a philosophical discourse on the meaning of life; that if God is the creator and we are born in the image of God, we too have the power to create and give our existence eternal continuity. He believes that art, in a way, negates death.

But when he paints, thinking stops and instinctive response to the visuals of form and color takes over. Especially with color which is the dynamo that stirs his emotions and drives his brush. For Chams, as words are to language, so color is to painting.

It's all there, in one canvas after another; from the moment you walk into Alwane Gallery, where Chams is exhibiting a collection of his recent oils. Immediately, our visual senses are caught by the patches of confetti color that dance across the picture surface in syncopated rhythm and combine into anchored masses of energy. To the perceptive eye, what appears chaotic reveals hidden order. Look for them and you'll see segments of nature magically take shape - earth and sky, hills and valleys, forests and foliage, and always, always, flowers.

Many of the small paintings are executed one unprepared wood, lending a warm brown aura to the mélange of colors, which in their variegated detail strongly evoke the intimacy found in Vuillard's interiors. Chams disturbs this intimacy, however, by choosing to extend the painted imagery onto the frame surfaces. This tends to pull the eye away from the picture and intrude upon its full appreciation.

In the large canvases, Chams plays with activating the subtle variations of hue and light embedded in one major color chord.

Against and alongside wide fields of yellow or orange or red or mauve or grey, he counterpoints complementary patches of chroma and turns them into convincing images of nature.

This is Lebanese abstract expressionism at its best. I say "Lebanese" to establish the special quality of color that differentiates it from American or European abstract expressionism. The style intuitive, gestural and abstract may be similar, but nowhere do we find the same vibrant light in color, the same nature-induced textural interest. Compare Chams (or Shafic Abboud, Lebanon's leader in abstract expressionism) with De Kooning or Pollock, for example, and you'll see what I mean.

The unusual character of Lebanon's environment, in both land and people, has been for decades an extremely strong force in directing the creative impulse of many artists towards abstract expressionism. It is as though they find in this style the perfect syntax to convey the contrast, drama and kaleidoscopic colors of Lebanon's land and sea: the diversity, vitality, spontaneity, assertion, inventiveness and chaotic energy of its people.

As for that special quality of color - limpid and brimming in sun-drenched light - it is rooted more in impressionism than expressionism. In their affinity to light in color, Lebanon's artists take their cue from French impressionism, from the likes of Cezanne, Renoir, Monet, and Bonnard. Which, to coin a phrase, suggests "abstract impressionism" as a more appropriate label for what has become a solidly established school of Lebanese painting.

To Chams, color is everything and its well-spring is nature. He is village born and bred and still lives in the countryside northeast of Sidon with his wife Fatima Hajj, also a painter, and their two children. "I have always felt at one with color... and with nature," he says. "I remember as a child sitting next to the small pool in our village, building houses out of the mud and watching the harnesses cows nearby going around in circles threshing the wheat. I remember looking up from the brown mud and seeing all around me in vivid contrast all the marvelous colors of the land - trees in blossom, fields of flowers, terraced hillside and the brilliant far away sky. Until today, every time I touch the earth, scoop up a handful, I remember that day and its colors. They are still with me..."

The Daily Star, May 1, 1998, exhibition at Gallery Alwane