Baalbaki Abdel-Hamid 

Odeissé (Lebanon), 1940 - 2013

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Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki is one of the first students at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Lebanese University, founded in 1966. The composition of the school year matched the sociocultural collage of Lebanese society. In contrast to ALBA, to the American University, and to private courses (by Cyr, Guvder and others), it combined every cultural background and antagonism.

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At the Lebanese University, Baalbaki came in the wake of those whom Aref Rayess would support in their claims to a national identity. For the majority of painting instructors at the time, this was essentially a denominational problem, even if they claimed that it was nothing of the sort. Each went along with their theory. The years from 1966 to 1975 were a decade of shared experience for painters from very different backgrounds, driven by the most diverse ambitions.

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Baalbaki approached the issue in a symbolic way. One of his best canvases represents a dead man wearing a ribbon of mourning that seems to announce the death of representation and the Illusionist processes of painting. With ironic distance and light parody, the painter seems to say goodbye to his own youth, or rather goodbye to what he would have been without painting: a young dead man. But he was also naive enough to believe that everything could be acquired just by putting your mind to it.

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To keep Western representation at a distance, the development of a more complex pictorial scene would prove more difficult, in the oscillation between folklore and the difficulty of total assimilation. This was the issue of using popular myths and mythologies in the “machinery” or setting of the canvas. By being too close to folklore, the influence of the Egyptian school of painting did not allow him to tackle Lebanese subjects. The same applied to the possibility of identification offered by Rayess’ teaching, who did, at that time, a graphic report on Beirut’s red-light district,  in which he saw an indictment against the hypocrisy of society. The subject was new in his intention to go far beyond its own treatment, in order to speak about a close reality, and about what it signified. He wanted to move away from convention in his way of painting, while taking anti-convention as a point of departure.

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The difficulties in approaching reality and engaging into the processes of representation led Baalbaki to paintings where he explored popular pictorial imaginary through metaphor and its translation into visual elements. He tried in vain to develop and perfect these internal mechanisms of composing reality through a series of approaches, but they revealed themselves unfitted to express reality other than in bits and pieces. 

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After obtaining a scholarship from the Lebanese government, Baalbaki spent three years in Paris, hovering between extreme perplexity and deaf refusal, as he had few points of reference at his disposal, such as Arab art. He studied with Rohner at l’Ecole supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. Reading little French and speaking it badly, he took long walks in Paris with only his visual memory to note landmarks, and knew every image of every street by heart, without being able to name a single one.

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His relationship to reality was linked to an iconic representation, far more complex and elaborate than at the beginning, whose themes were not yet evident to him. He was a Shiite, and approached the city without the Sunni tradition of urban practice. He then had to explore and express it at the same time; the richness of exploration not always being doubled by this expression, for he collided into his own neurotic rejection of “perfection”, of imprisonment in form. In fact, the forms on which Baalbaki could work were rare. He did not resort to those that touched him the most in the communautary sense, distancing himself from figurative data in which, by contrast, Charaf would plunge, and speak about them in a personal way, using popular arts in all its forms. Baalbaki had to find painting a place in the world. But when a socialised form of popular expression does not constantly draw from its living sources, the result is an dead-end.

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The teaching that Baalbaki received letf a strong mark on him. Rayess socialised form and painting by a politicisation that erased denominational differences to bring the Lebanese people together. This social thematic overrode the demands of community legacy, seen as a way of freezing men in their community, when the aim was precisely to help them out of it. 

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Cautious by nature, Baalbaki did not follow this path. Unable to respond to painting at a national level, he insisted on its role as foudation of the history of Lebanese and Arabic painting. To his eyes, it was distorted by European painting’s overly strong influence. 

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He wanted to work on establishing a painting movement closer to reality, which had its own symbolism when it came to constructing a canvas. A symbolic realism, rather than a magic realism, where the symbol is supported and its meaning conveyed without any heaviness.  

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One cannot say that Baalbaki’s art is disparate, but the diverse sources of his paintings constantly widens the rift between images created with a real sense of originality, and virulent chromolithographs, that cannot be blamed for colorizing sentimental pictures, but rather for the difficulty to decipher their message.

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In some canvases, Baalbaki surpasses a certain folklorism of regional art, not only through technical repetition, but by forming the image as an object full of visual meaning and significance, whose unity is ruptured by a separation of the subject and its treatment. 

The pictorial response is articulated, in the same picture, as series of breaks that seem constraining and illegible when read at the same level. These discordant readings induce nostalgia for those complicated knots, to the point of revealing communitary and religious specifics. 

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This discretion of the displacement and the contradictory covering of meaning becomes a doctrine and a tangible reality of thought in its application to painting. Perhaps this explains Baalbaki’s success in certain canvases and his wandering about in others. For when the issues he raises are put in perspective, they remain without any echo or response beyond his own painting.