Biography:

1957 Born Beirut, Lebanon
Lives and works in Paris, France

Education
1987 MFA, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
1987 D.N.S.E.P., Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, France
1982 BFA, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
1978 D.E.C., Vanier College, Montreal, Canada

Solo Exhibitions
2002 Persistence of Memory --Oasis, June Kelly Gallery, New York
Transformations II, MMG Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2000 Transformations, Janine Rubeiz Gallery, Beirut
1999 Books, Galerie du Tableau Gallery, Marseille
1997 Notions of Exile and Memory, Shirley Fiterman Gallery, Borough of
Manhattan Community College, New York
Particles, Janine Rubeiz Gallery, Beirut
1996 Marks, Office du Tourism du Lebanon, Paris
1995 Fields, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris
Fields, Confluences Galleries, Paris
1993 Recent Works, Confluences Galleries, Paris
1991 Forces et Lumières, Jardin d'Acclimatation Galleries, Paris
1990 Recent Works, Gallery EOS, Paris
1987 Duo Show with C. Hachon, Villas Nîmazur, Nîmes
1985 Recent Works, Bourget Gallery, Montreal
Recent Works, Gallery B, Nîmes
1983 Two Artists to Discover, Place des Arts Galleries, Montreal
1982 Duo Show with F. Mulvey, McGill University Architecture Gallery, Montreal

Collections
Audi Bank Art Collection, Paris, France
Bay-Saint-Paul Contemporary Art Museum, Quebec
Alcan Art Collection, Montreal, Quebec
Tetouan National Bank, Morocco
Asseleh Foundation, Algiers, Algeria

An Article by Daily Star

"If you put the Mona Lisa upside down it’s just the Mona Lisa upside down," says Hanibal Srouji, cocking his head to one side while looking at a pair of his paintings hanging on the wall in Raouche’s Galerie Janine Rubeiz.

Srouji, 48, is a Paris-based Lebanese painter who has spent much of the last three decades developing a visual vocabulary of abstract, interchangeable forms. His latest exhibition, "Touches," includes 20 canvases grouped into series. Each series is, in effect, an exercise, an opportunity for the artist to test out the staying power of a particular set of images, as indicated by their titles, such as "cages," “rhythms," " undulations" and " marks of violence."

“All the paintings are square," says Srouji, now cocking his head to the other side. “Here they are arranged in diptychs or triptychs." The exact pairings could change, however, as could the orientation of each individual work. As Srouji suggests, putting the Mona Lisa upside down may be just the Mona Lisa upside down, but putting one of his own paintings upside down could very well open up new possibilities, even new meanings, for the work. It’s the kind of creative act Srouji encourages.

"I' m trying to include the spectator in the process," he explains. "Art is a process of self-liberation, of liberation from tangible things or ideas. The cubists sought the liberation of form. The Impressionists sought the liberation of color."

Describing his work as abstract, lyrical and figurative at once, Srouji says he is after "the true meaning of abstraction, so you can take out of it what you need and reduce it to its essence."
Born in 1957, Srouji began drawing when he was a teenager. “I was always interested in what color could do," he recalls, “just a little bit more than a normal kid."

As he grew older, he studied science, then literature, then art. “It took me five years to finish my BA," he says with a shrug and a smile. Srouji was 18 when the Civil War in Lebanon broke out. He worked briefly with the Red Cross. But when his house got wrecked, he left Beirut for Montreal. After finishing his masters - writing his thesis on the role of the object in art from Marcel Duchamp to the appropriation art of the 1980s - he left Montreal for Paris.

“What I' m doing in my work," says Srouji, “is just talking about myself as a nomad. My roots are here in Lebanon but I’ve been floating for 30 years."

When asked what keeps him from returning to Lebanon permanently, given he' s had at least four successful exhibitions here since the late 1990s, he says: " I don' t have the capital to say, ' Okay, I'm going to stay, because I work, I teach, my wife is French, my son is French. But if the situation here became clearer, it would encourage people to return."

There is definitely an ephemeral, whimsical touch to Srouji’s latest paintings, done in acrylic on raw, unprimed canvas, using varying amounts of water to give some colors a viscous, translucent appearance.

“It looks like it takes me one day to make a painting," he says. “But it takes me six months. You might think it is created in a violent way but actually in happens quite slowly. The impact [for the viewer] is direct, but it’s an accumulation over time."

Srouji's show is dominated by a series of thick vertical lines, which represent the bars of a cage, as emblems of confinement, but also function like the bars of a musical composition, serving to pace and provide rhythm for the work.

“I compose songs," says Srouji with another smile, as he pulls out a small notebook to flip open a page full of notes that he penned for his son. “Painting for me is visual music. For me, when I hear music, I see colors."

Another element that stands out in Srouji's show is his tendency to burn holes through his canvases, sometimes exposing a second skin of canvas beneath, sometimes exposing nothing but a wood support or the wall.

“For me, burning the canvas is a kind of drawing," he explains. “I could use burnt charcoal but it wouldn’t be the same. It’s about the consumption of the support itself. It is a motif of war, yes, but it has become a decorative motif, a musical motif. Now we can take this motif and play with it. The war is far behind. I was 18 when the conflict started. I lived through it and beyond it."
Like everything else in his art, Srouji is willing to turn history on its head to see how it looks upside down.

Article, Review: Respiration by Joseph Tarrab (In French)

Par rupture de symétrie, le vide engendre des particules élémentaires qui, en s'entrechoquant, génèrent d'autres particules lesquelles, à leur tour...

Hanibal Srouji ne fait pas de la mécanique quantique. Il fait de la peinture. Ses particules sont des pétales. Longtemps, elles furent des trous de balles, d'éclats, de feu. Aux impacts perforants succèdent les caresses effleurées. L'amour après la guerre? Le repos du guerrier? Voire.

C'est toujours le même espace vide animé d'une énergie de dissémination qui sème à tout vent les variantes modulées d'un même module. Pour fuir vers la périphérie en ordre dispersé, tels des électrons libres, elles n'en préservent pas moins entre elles un lien invisible, si ténu soit-il, à travers le suspens précaire qui organise la toile en explosion fixe.

L'essaimage n'est pas fortuit. Il est savamment construit ou, si l'on veut, déconstruit. D'où le subtil équilibre qui maintient, avec une suprême élégance, dans un espace multidirectionnel, les pétales en apesanteur, c'est-à-dire les touches délicates, féminines, fluides, aériennes à peine posées sur la toile écrue et pourtant déjà complexes avec leurs lavis évanescents, leur denses liserés, leurs invaginations matricielles. Tout flotte dans un état de grâce inducteur d'euphorie esthétique.

L'éclatement de la fleur n'est pas arbitraire. Déjà les diptyques, nombreux dans le travail de Srouji suggèrent toujours une dichotomie fondamentale, une sorte de clivage du support renvoyant à la schize du réel psycho-socio-politique. La dissémination ne fait que refléter métaphoriquement, et sans que le peintre l'ait nécessairement entendu ainsi, la fragmentation avancée du psychisme libanais, de la société actuelle dans son incapacité de reconstituer la rose effeuillée, l'unité intérieure, l'Etat, la culture.

Exquise expérience visuelle jubilatoire, la peinture de Srouji n'en parle pas moins par la respiration rythmique alternée qu'elle amorce. A l'expire centrifuge de dispersion visible répond, encore invisible dans le cycle du monde, de la vie et de l'art, l'inspire centripète du retour.
La tragédie de la dépénalisation ne finira pas en pur et simple anéantissement. Le centre vide est le lieu de la rose abolie et tout à la fois celui d'une virtuelle rose à venir. Les pétales désertent leurs boutons sans pour autant les oublier. Ils semblent garder mémoire et peut-être regret de leur partenariat de corolle.

La rose renaitra. La peinture l'énonce tacitement. Qui écoute son silence? Qui prend de la graine?