Ghoraieb Khalil
Damour (Lebanon), 1881-Beirut, 1961
Khalil Ghoraieb was born in Damour in 1881 and started out as a house painter. Traces of his activity can be found between 1912 and 1957 – the date of his last participation in the Salon of the National Ministry of Education in the UNESCO building. A prolific painter in the naive style, Ghoraeib reproduced swans on lakes in the dead of night, Alpine landscapes, prints of Beirut bakers and patisseries, but also the portrait of Emir Béchir by Giusti. His naivety came from an excess of self-confidence, that is to say a feigned clumsiness, whereas a painter like Khalil Zghaib proceeded from a vision of the reality of the world, an imperious vision that sought to correct the resemblance, and in doing so, found itself further away from it.
Ghoraieb perceived painting through the painters he used as his models, and the discrepancies in his craftsmanship were his most personal and precious proprerty. In several of his canvases, he goes further than a Sunday painter. He never saw himself as one, but as a professional painter – a definition based on his own reading of his work. His originality was also linked to the social acceptance of the profession of painting. What he did in 1910, he continued to do more or less until 1950, but his painting was based less on stereotypes than on the vision that he had of them. He copied canvases of a museum of his very personal choice.
Ghoraieb had a clumsy fervor for painting, while Zghaib embraced the painting of the world. He was a literal painter, without any signs or symbols. One cannot deny him his love of painting, nor his recurrent way of distorting and discarding an exact copy, or of seeing the varieties of transmission and of discrepancy in his own way. He was dependent on an approach that had a certain pictorial culture, but no other design than this one, perceived as a handicraft. Yet this craft was not socially accepted, and could not merge with current trends. He played the artist and, for him, the only manner of doing so was to place his paintings.
In contrast to Zghaib, he was a painter of the literal who wanted to imitate. But one shows what one wants to show, and everything stays to that point. But did he really want to go beyond the technical level that he reached? How can his copies be explained? He tried to impose a rule on painting where he only copied pictures. Not that he had not created pictures himself. That was not the problem. It came from the fact that a painter cannot be a universal colorist. While for Zghaib, pictorial rendering was secondary, Ghoraeib emptied his painting of his personal story and tried to slip in the stories of others.
His case allows for a questioning of the limited perception of painting when it’s seen as a print. For him, imitation was the only act that delimited the portrait, and everything else only functioned in the game of social position that the portrait occupied. So was he a painter of shop signs in search of developing his art, who understood painting literally with a sort of calligraphic naivety ? And what perception could we have about a painting entirely made of copies? Some large canvases by Ghoraieb are conceived as a scenography of the imaginary and of the unconscious – a little boy on a horse, a false perspective – and here his stammering, awkward speech can be understood: that he was not an awkward painter, but he was trying to paint what cannot be easily seen. It is not because he did not see it that he did not try to let us discover it. Ghorayeb did not copy the model, but the photograph of the model. This interpretation of photography placed him in the confusion of naivety, but also in the confusion of representation itself.
Ghorayeb did not copy the rider on his horse, but the photograph of the rider, up to the white sheet that served as a background, which whiteness was depicted on the paper, up to its outline on the ground and its folds.
He did not copy a subject but its representation. The svery ubject of his painting was this frontal representation that he copied in a code that was out of sync, a code applied to the reproduction of photography, approached short-sightedly like an element of decoration.
He settled into painting by this blurring of codes, and engaged with weariness and meticulousness in what Farroukh only perceived as a rivalry with the camera. For Ghorayeb, the world was quite simply a photograph that needed to be copied in terms of painting.
If photography was the code of the code and had to be imitated, Ghorayeb’s scenes considered the painter as the copier of the photograph. For him the photograph was therefore the origin of the painting.
This double subtraction was fascinating because it left the conceptual frame, only to return to it through material means of application.
However, taking this path, he felt he had to embellish this photography. That is to say, to attract it towards the credibility of representation, where the large white spaces of this photographic print gave the canvas a sepulchral look, to underline realism.
He added this mysterious connexion, as this process of opening eyes and dilating pupils whose dark fixity contrasted even more by the slowing down of movement. What is also fascinating about Ghorayeb is the way in which the system is pushed to the limits of its logic, to where photography no longer has any purpose, except to model the scene.
From then on he made a copy of the copy, adding what he supposed to be improvements and corrections, that is to say the details and techniques of his system pushed to the extreme.
In contrast to the game of shadows, the decorative techniques confronted the game of illusion with their rudimentary nature and these mysterious conflicts with what traditional painting was imagined to be.
The novelty in the pictorial landscape was his way of replacing and of using this discrepancy in an internal framework, beyond any confrontation with pictorial culture, except throug the illusory idea of what a painting ought to be.
Figuration pushed to this unexpected understanding ends up using it right to the end without bypassing or cutting it short, as other painters generally did.
These historic, blurred discrepancies were at the core of understanding Lebanese painting for more than a half-century. Painting returned to photography, as if photography had preceded it and, in an even more complex way, as if photography was an object for copying, like a still life, for example.
Through these gaps, the relationship to photography broke the relationship to History of Art, and always tried to push posterior modes into figuration and representation, considering or treating them as if they were anterior. Figuration, representation and paintings disappeared to the benefit facing between photography and painting.
It was not about copying a Cubist still life with a Quattrocento technique. It was not about a misplaced great art, or a pseudo-virtuoso technique, but about the most abrupt mental craftsmanship, an instrumentalisation of figuration that regressed through a historic blurring, and brought something new in the pictorial means that it used.
It was not about copying Rubens in a mosaic, or going to the fringes of visual culture, but through the contribution of photographs from magazines and newspapers, and popular sources of the imagination, about leading entire sections of visual culture towards other interpretations.
Khalil Ghoraieb - Still life, 1934