Galerie Claude Lemand

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17UIY1l3kR­MIvzftS3_LtwR6PMT-D2Lha/view?usp=sharing
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SHAFIC ABBOUD. Masterpieces 1948-2000.
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Claude Lemand (quo­ta­tions):
 Born in Lebanon on November 22, 1926 and died in Paris on April 8, 2004, Shafic Abboud is the most French painter in the Arab world. He had a great affinity with the painting of Pierre Bonnard, with the pic­to­rial tech­nique of Nicolas de Staël, he had belonged to the “New School of Paris” and he was the solo Arab artist to be invited by the French com­mittee of young critics to par­tic­i­pate in the First Paris Biennale in 1959. He had also suc­ceeded in abol­ishing the border between this learned Western art and the pop­ular Lebanese cul­ture with which he had been deeply imbued since child­hood. His paint­ings are a man­i­festo for color and light, for freedom and Life; they cel­e­brate the sen­su­ality of pic­to­rial mate­rial, that of women’s bodies, shim­mering tex­tiles and the inspiring and heav­enly beauty of the country of his child­hood. His work and his per­son­ality func­tioned as a per­ma­nent bridge between France, Lebanon and the Arab world.

 His mature works are trans­fig­u­ra­tive, a syn­thesis between his fairy-tale like child­hood world and his tech­nical mas­tering of abstract Parisian painting. He sought to tran­scend the latter, stim­u­lated by both Bonnard and de Staël, by giving it a soul of its own and a rich and lumi­nous tex­ture. Through his paint­ings, Shafic Abboud aimed to share his own view on both his inside and out­side worlds.

 Shafic Abboud was nei­ther a prac­ti­tioner nor a believer in any reli­gion, but he was greatly influ­enced in his child­hood by the splendor of the Byzantine Greco-Arabic liturgy. Art tri­umphs over death, even if only sym­bol­i­cally. “Great artists never die!” » (Adonis).
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Shafic Abboud (quo­ta­tions):
 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, but whether it be true or false, this “theory” does make me paint. (Mai 1982)

 The painter is madly in love with what he is seeking for (and which he there­fore does not know). (No date). I go to my studio with great desire and with that bound­less delight at the prospect of painting. I go in and look around with the delec­ta­tion of the lover as well as his fears. (March 1982)
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Tom Laurent. “With an oeuvre full of light and colourful pic­to­rial flux, Shafic Abboud’s work had immersed itself within the trends of the most lib­eral abstrac­tion as early as the 1950s, from which derived an impas­sioned lyri­cism. Arriving in Paris in 1947, the Lebanese artist never forgot his roots. He was very attached to his native country and trav­elled to Lebanon reg­u­larly. Abboud’s work can be described as a syn­cretism between western moder­nity, having seized its mag­ni­tude with the new Ecole de Paris to which he adhered, and the ori­ental prism emerging from Byzantine Greco-Arab places of wor­ship. He was seduced by Bonnard’s inte­rior scenes ema­nating light and more­over by Nicolas de Staël’s aes­thetic. Abboud grad­u­ally aban­doned the fig­u­ra­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion, which was still very much pre­sent in his works, giving way to his own, omit­ting sub­ject mat­ters yet duly rec­og­niz­able. In Shafic Abboud’s oeuvre, his mature works are those which com­bine both per­sonal expe­ri­ence and abstract tech­nique. He explained in 1979 that, `there is a visual trigger coming from a real-life event in the gen­esis of each painting’. Deceased in 2004, Abboud said that he worked as a `story-teller’.” (Tom Laurent, in Art Absolument).
Translated from French by Valérie Didier