DUBAI: The Lebanese artist discusses his abstract painting, damaged by the Beirut blast and recently showcased by Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai.
The painting has recently been showcased by Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai. (Supplied)
I was not in Beirut on August 4. I was coming back after someone called me and told me that there had been a big explosion. My house was 100 meters away from the blast. It was completely devastated. I couldn’t get into my studio because there was a huge painting that fell down diagonally. The whole studio was completely upside down. It was like a bad dream and I can’t even recall what happened. There was so much silence. You didn’t hear anything but the sound of glass.
The original title of this painting was “Revolution” and then I changed it to “Collusion.” It was born just after the October Revolution in Lebanon, when people went to the streets, facing the power in place. There are two sides: the right side has a cold tonality that represents who’s running the country. The left side has a hot tonality, there’s a lot of skin color that represents the heat of the people. They are completely separate but in a way, it’s one painting. There’s a story inside every figure — some are throwing stones, which happened during the year of the revolution. It’s a collusion between the two sides and a depiction of how the country is run.
I finished the piece around three weeks before the blast. When I took it out of the studio and brought it into another studio, I felt this huge hole inside it. My girlfriend told me to not restore it and we will stitch it like a wound. So, I put a patch on the back and then we stitched this 27-centimeter hole. It merges so well with the rest of the style. You’ll see the stitches and I was stitching this painting for nine months. If you look around this painting, there are tiny pieces of glass. The painting is like the whole year in Lebanon, from the revolution to the disaster.
Each painting has its own process. During the process, everything changes and there’s nothing that’s rigid and stable. I let the painting drive me, in a way. Some of them come so easily without any consciousness. I had this huge painting and I knew what I wanted to say.
