Dib Kenaan
Dlepta (Lebanon), 1801-1882
From the moment he takes in charge the history of painting, a painter is confronted with all the difficulties of representation, beyond the codes of the subject and mere copying. Kenaan Dib ceased to be a painter and became more of a craftsman of representation when he copied the codes and conventions of painting. One can then see his work as clumsy and devoid of originality, and he himself did not always realise he had made copies and considered his work as the natural language of what he perceived in the history painting. But it is necessary to remember the way in which paintings – especially paintings of piety – were read in the second half of the 19th century.
Born in Dlepta, Kenaan Dib studied at Mar Abda Harharya in Jdeidet Ghazir. He was trained by his uncle, Moussa Dib, and is affiliated to Kobressi-Moussa Dib. He only truly became a painter when he set forth his own code, turning out to be a landmark in the history of painting in Lebanon. He then started to draw on what he was, but also on this part of imagination linked to a cultural collective and to a characterisation of the individual.
His importance is not only his naive interpretation, but also his pleasure in painting and discovering the possibilities of expression in the context of his subjects. Daoud Corm had the same quality, pushing his own pleasure of painting to the extreme.
In the same way, this work was not about a naive interpretation, but about constructing a personal pictorial language. These mechanisms are linked to the formation process of the individual.
Kenaan Dib followed a tradition, but he was so involved in it that he did not even notice it. His uncle Moussa was the Father Superior of a monastery, and he himself was a cleric, so his religious iconography was linked to a theological vision of the world. Faced with the academic approach, or rather with his interpretation of it, he insisted on producing scenes his own way, rather than reproducing them in an academic way.
What was intended to be only an apprenticeship of technique and of the hand, allowed him to push traditional imagery and the novelty of the subject even further and in the most natural way, only through its pictorial treatment.