ABI-RACHED Samir
Beirut, 1947
In Abi-Rached’s cultural references, painting appeared as one of the last possible Christian handicraft, with an understanding of how to “craft” an image. The historic lineage linking Middle Eastern Christianity to theologies of the image and representation was broken, resulting in a complete shift at the historic level.
Surrealism influenced Abi-Rached’s generation. To this painter’s mind, it reinstated figurative painting – but he did not need Surrealist exaggeration and its luxury of detail, trapped into the inconcious and unaware that the unconcious is, in its very definition, a trap, to render what he percieved around him and to make his work seem plausible.
Because of his training, his comprehension of Surrealism, and his manner of positioning himself in the socio-cultural milieu of painting in Lebanon, for him, someone who creates images is more like a skilled craftsman than a messenger with a vision. His painting was shaped by Alexander Kalomitzeff’s studio in Beirut.
He made sentimental imagery and chromos for several years, which did not satisfy him or his audience. If it is true that a painter paints what he can in the society that he finds himself in, then he can also paint what he imagines while devoting himself to an achievable ideal.
Abi-Rached saw in the mystical Surrealism of the French popular and post-Surrealist magazine Planète, an ideal to which he could dedicate, as the other “realisms” failed to make him recognised as a painter. His discovery of Surrealism was less about developments in History of Art than about his personal interpretation of an interior world that emerged on paper, one he felt was real and which gained pictorial value through his precise rendering.
Assembling his visions into new artworks, he would give independent specifics to each aspect, so that the eye was drawn to individual details whose disparity often prevents an appreciation of the work as a whole. Only the great technical precision of his drawings and ‘literary’ paintings bridged Abi-Rached with the European Surrealist movement of the late 1960s.
A fringe of the Lebanese French-speaking community echoed this movement, where the ravishing promotion of Salvador Dali became the symbol of a revolt that seemed to correspond with the early days of the gradual liberation of the conservative Lebanese society.
But it seems too easy to analyse Abi-Rached’s work only as a shift of references or through historic perspective. What matters most is to accept this painter as he is.
Surrealism, in its relationship with technical rendering and figuration, appeared to Abi-Rached’s generation as the last possible interpretation of images freed from the weight of theology or the avatars of culture. They did not understand that André Breton*, the founder of Surrealism, was a faithful disciple of Gustave Moreau*, and that Breton was fascinated by Moreau’s depictions of jewels on the neck of Herodias*.
In its most literary dimension, Surrealist imagery became the current rhetoric and the reflection of the minutiae and cleverness of technique. The supreme irony was that visual strangeness proved the difficulty of having a precise, unverifiable existence in Lebanese culture.