SHAFIC ABBOUD. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL. Paintings, 1960-2000.
Lydia Harambourg.
The luminous confidence. A painting of effusion : Shafic Abboud shows a group of small-scale works spread out over forty years. From the paintings of the sixties until the most recent ones, we note his ongoing luminous conquest through the use of coloured materials. His palette remembers oriental riches and lightens up until we see the emergence of combinations of yellow, orange and red, of blue and violet filtering the light. Abboud transposes reality. He dives into it to immerse himself, to bring back a fragmented history onto the canvas. Here we have a piece of fabric, elsewhere a tree, a tiling for which he discovers a linear and coloured equivalence. It is as though the painter filtered colour, as well as perfumes, sounds. Whether it is in his studio beside the Montsouris Park where he has worked since 1951 or the one along the Loire, he searches his memory until he comes across his subject. His painterly narrative is filtered equally by visual emotions as by the pictorial work, ample and ardent, concentrated. More literate in the beginning, his subjects were progressively « devoured » by the light circulating inside those labyrinthine spaces. Working in series, his Chambres, his Nuits, the sea, the gardens, the female body, move across the canvases like shimmering jewels, in harmonic sound sequences or confidentially. Sometimes subjected to a luminous saturation, sometimes absorbed by darkness, his pigments mixed with egg are intermingled thanks to the action of a brush that lets through coloured intoxications, reveals the essence of things, their poetry. At the crossroads of two civilizations, Abboud has adapted the passage of time, in order to attain his language’s fundamental unity, the one provided by light, space and by a chromatic plentifulness.
