(1926 - 2001)

Biography:

After his beginnings as an expressionist, Said Akl turned towards other horizons. He was born in 1926 in Damour. In 1949 he attended the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts then went to Paris in 1951, where he devoted himself to study and research. He stayed there until 1954, the year he organized his first exhibition at the Gallery Le Cadre.

He made regular trips to Europe: A study scholarship in Rome in 1955 and three trips to Paris in 1958, 1963 and 1964. In the French capital, he visited the studios of Waldemar George, Marc Saint-Saens, and Jean Picart Le Doux.

In the fifties, he felt for the first time the burning need to assert his independence. Said Akl's works are almost exclusively cerebral. Each line, each color is in a place assigned by the intellect. Nonetheless, this "intellectualist" world gives the impression of spontaneous work, springing from naive and candid images.

When, at the beginning of his career, he was insisting on the abyss that cut him off from reality, he was already seeing forms that few people perceived, such as the squirming of fantastic forms that humidity traces on limestone, or which sap leaves behind on a tree trunk section. All that is required then is a talented brush to materialize from it an enchanted world.

However, Said Akl himself wanted to be the author of this marvelous creation in the universe and his undertaking appears as a reflexion of the work of nature. He first draws a simple natural form and, as in a mosaic, embeds in the outlines of the drawing letters of the alphabet, either linked by handwriting or separated by printing types of geometric or irregular shape. Then, he spreads the colors in a way to emphasize each letter and to link it to the others within a vast whole with harmonious rhythms. Throughout this complex operation, the letters assert their own presence but it is the action interconnecting them which creates a magical atmosphere and a kind of visual intoxication.

However, Said Akl's ambition is not to limit himself to that. From his experience in the seventies, he has accomplished an almost decisive breakthrough: He has developed a calligraphic stylism, blended and simplified, incorporated to the whole and to the details of the serene enjoyment which authentic art can bring about.

This vision is not only inspired by the horizons of the East. It goes beyond to reach the marvelous worlds of virgin lands as if he were recreating the genesis of the world.

(He took part in all the exhibitions of the Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts, in the Biennales of Alexandria and Sao Paulo and of Paris - 1954)

(President of the Republic Prize - 1955)

2001: Akl died leaving his works among his family