"This man sees the Angels", writes Mounzer Masri of artist Nizar Sabour. One thing is certain: the paintings now exhibited at Aïda Cherfan and the Centre Cultural Français find their inspiration in centuries of representing the divine.

Nizar Sabour was born in Lattakieh in 1958 and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Damascus where he is now an associate professor. He was also a Candidate of Philosophy in the Sciences of Art in Moscow in 1990. His works can be found in the collections of many museums not only in the Middle East, but in Washington and Moscow as well.

"Les portails de l'âme", "the Gates of the Soul", presents the fruit of the artist's fascination with religious icons whether Christian, Muslim, or even Pharaonic. Though the feel conveyed corresponds well to the rough energy of archaic work, this is obtained through very different means as the colours are resolutely modern and the technique more reminiscent of Dada collages than a monk's patient brushwork. Yet a striking feature of the series is the fact that the contemporary treatment does not affect the evocative power of the icon. Sabour seems to have deliberately deconstructed conventional religious imagery to isolate its characteristic elements and test their power of evocation separately. At the same time, all these traditional elements: wooden support, triptych or gate-shaped canvas, haloes, flattened perspective, verticality -- are appropriated by the artist and treated in completely non-traditional ways. Aside from the icon-related elements, is his own personality that he applies freely to the support. The haloed characters, which recur the most, are reduced to little more than literally iconic silhouettes, that out of context might be mistaken for a chess pawn but here keep all their expression as ancient and venerable. The wild exploration in colours and shapes does not interfere with our reading of the images.

The correlation between the shape of many of the works and the title of the exhibit is no coincidence, and the artist confirms his intention to evoke doorways in some pieces where cultual objects (a candle, a votive statuette) stand on a wooden piece that juts out of the composition like a doorstep. The viewer is invited to "enter" the space of the picture, so well defined by clear framing elements, and lose himself in contemplation. The traditional icon has lost none of its significance in Sabour's interpretation: it has merely embraced a new skin.

Beirut's hosting two simultaneous exhibits of Sabour's work is a unique opportunity to witness a progression from one to the other. "Les Portails de l'âme" correspond to an older period of the artist's work, and "Vie dans la cendre" ("Life in the ash") is its chronological successor, but the passing of time is expressed in a deeper way. The works from the latter exhibit inscribe themselves stylistically with contemporary art, no longer with ancient religious art, so that the entire history of art seems to have taken place between the two exhibits. On yet another level, one can't help but get the impression that the paintings of "La vie dans la cendre" are an expression of what the passage of time would do to the earlier ones. They look like the remains of once-decipherable images, an impression made all the more vivid by the fact that under the rough abstract layer of black "ash" it is often possible to glimpse figurative scenes such as a table set for a meal, or even fragments of Sabour's haloed silhouettes themselves. One wonders what exactly the artist may have meant by the title he chose: does it imply a lifetime spent in the ash, or is it that life can be found in such ashes?

Article by Joumana Medlej