 Paul
Guiragossian (Self-
portrait)
From the very beginning the critics disagree about the "identity"
of Paul Guiragossian's art. Some insist on its proletarian character
while others dwell on its hieratic aspects, reminiscent of religious
rites.
But Guiragossian remained silent. It was enough for him to be struggling
with his painting, to work it endlessly, as if totally possessed
by his art.
Biography:
Born in Jerusalem in 1926 to survivors
of the genocide, Paul Guiragossian settled in Beirut with his family
in 1939. He started to paint in 1942 at the Yarkon Studio. In 1957,
he received a scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Florence. In 1961-2, he spent a year studying and painting in Paris.
The rest of his life was spent living and painting in Beirut.
Paul Guiragossian's early education
was strictly religious. In 1944 he began his artistic training at
the Italian Academy Pietro Iaghetti, then between 1946 and 1949
at the Institute Yarcon.
He completed his formative period by attending the Florence Academy
of Fine Arts in 1956.
After that, he widened his circle of contacts with the West and
spent three years in France and as many in the USA.
Guiragossian had a foreboding sense
of tragedy from his earliest years. Some of his early paintings
were haunted by a figure who had lost one leg, a prophecy of his
own misfortune, when in the early 1970s he lost a leg in an elevator
accident. In his lifetime, Guiragossian became Lebanon's most celebrated
painter, a renown he retains to this day. Upon his death in 1993,
Guiragossian received a state funeral
Paul Guiragossian was consumed by his
art and paid little attention to anything but his family and his
painting. His mature works express the complexities of the human
condition through renderings of vertical, elongated, purged bodies,
both static and in motion, painted with thick layers of often luminous
colors. He also created frescoes, mosaics, stained glass windows,
sculpture, and was a book illustrator. His paintings are always
serious in feeling, and it is impossible to resist their force and
beauty.
Self Realization:
He began his career in Lebanon by painting
scenes of daily life, his family and the social environment in the
slums of Beirut: poor families, crying children, beggars on the
sidewalks, hungry tramps, and corpses on their deathbed. Since he
was closely acquainted with poverty, he painted it with biting realism:
thick black lines, winding, twisting, breaking, bodies throbbing
with suffering. His brush strokes are thick, brutal and denounce
this misery in a tragicomical context.
The family is the dominant theme of his art.
It is a double theme covering poverty and tenderness. Beyond the
immediate presence of black, one sees colors with the vividness
of stained-glass, blinding the tragedy or swathing tenderness with
luminosity.
This impression led to the comment that Guiragossian's art can be
traced back to purely religious sources.
Style:
The artist, it is true, does not see
any difference between the Virgin Mary carrying Christ in her arms
under Saint Joseph's gaze and a mother from the slums of Beirut,
holding her child under the father's eyes.
In fact, everything blends together. The concrete is bonded with
these hieratic silhouettes evocative of religious rites. The artist
feels and sees, unaware of whether his painting is a protest against
an unjust social situation or a straight and simple sentimental
approval of compassionate sympathy, and even unaware of whether
or not it is the environment which imposes its themes upon his paintings
The dazzling stained-glass colors in
his painting, along with a considerable amount of black, give the
impression that Guiragossian's art, for the forms, he concentrates
on the attitude of bodies exhausted with suffering, and not in the
least on the facial expressions. Faces are even completely lacking,
except for rare exceptions as in "The City". It is as
if he painted poverty and not the poor.
Today Guiragossian goes as far as transforming
the bodies themselves into silhouettes, into columns of colors,
but thanks to his outstanding talent these stelae can suggest all
bodily shapes and movements, all their sadness.
This is done through gloomy colors and background, evocative of
a stifling sorrow. The experiment is still going on.
In the thirty years of his professional
career, Paul Guiragossian has to his credit some forty exhibitions
held in Lebanon and aboard, as well as in the various museums of
Paris, Frankfurt, Mar burg, London, Milan, Florence, Washington,
New York, Ohio, Tokyo, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon.
He has, moreover, obtained a number of prizes and received invitations
from various foreign governments. He paints man unchangeable over
centuries, beginning from the Stone Age: Man, the center of the
cosmos, center of nature, man the link between earth and sky, between
finite and infinite, Being and Nothingness, man the path that leads
toward the Absolute and the Eternal.
The human body is always present in
Guiragossian's work, the microcosm of the existence of the world,
the universe, Life, and Truth.
This profound faith in man created
in the image of God leads him to see, analyze and feel the universe
through man, to personify all that surrounds him - the city, the
mountain and the valley, the sea, the Tree of Life, the moods, feelings
and passions, Life and Death, Hope and Anguish, Joy and Misery,
affection, friendship, tenderness, and love. All these are symbolized
in human bodies that are ethereal, refined and unsubstantial, pressing
against each other, with no ornamental detail or embellishment.
He paints the Essential.
We should never forgot the influence
of the Armenian history and the Genocides, all this release his
diverse commitment to mysticism, Satanism, and theology in his great
works.
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Some of the artist's Artwork
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