Article: "My work, said the artist, has an oriental cachet put in a modern context"

After starting medical school, then political science and philosophy. Adel Saghir finally came to painting and sculpture. Already in his childhood, the paint box was the "magic box" that made him "Stay quiet".

He attended the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts between 1952 and 1957 and continued his art education at the American University. In 1959 he received a two-year scholarship to specialize at the Munich School of Fine Arts in Germany.

Adel Saghir wants to underline the part played by philosophy in his art: "Philosophy", he says, "helped me a great deal in achieving the synthesis between intellect and art... I have selected the oriental school because it is specifically abstract and because oriental thinking is abstract. Mysticism, Sufism, our literature and our religion are filled with abstractions".

About his art, he claims that going from one color to the next, from one form to another requires for him a functional formulation in the composition which had always been neglected. This theme-formulation plays an essential part and cannot be expressed without giving it a concrete form.
The Lebanese critic Victor Hakim also writes in the same vein: "Adel Saghir has chosen to express himself in terms of abstractions, starting from oriental elements of decoration. These elements include the use of the arabesque, especially curvilinear, but in Adel this arabesque is translated into broken lines in search of an impossible quadrature." He emphasizes that "our artist's merit consists in drawing his inspiration from the oriental stylistic background, but without repeating its implications... since he stretches his arabesques in order to extract from them the maximum of personal research. In so doing, he creates a new branch of international abstract art."

It is on this point that the critic Nazih Khater enlarges when he says that Adel Saghir "has selected the path that goes through the arabesque. This type of painting whose major concern is to be part of the oriental tradition, at the same time a renaissance and a transcription of the aesthetic symbols of the past, has always been treated as a mere outgrowth of Western abstract art. "But", he stated, "The work of art is defined by the process of its genesis and Adel Saghir's research can only mean and enrooting."

Saghir who has reached this type of abstraction had from the beginning studied modern German decoration which is influenced by the arabesque while remaining outside its symbolism and meaning. They are "pictures for contemplation" and make use of the beautiful rounded forms of Arabic calligraphy. These pictures are abstract because the letters which constitute them are not used to make up words.

However, after giving up "the beautiful rounded forms" to adopt broken lines, Adel Saghir keeps getting closer to western abstraction. Only his sculptures, especially those in metal, remain closer to oriental calligraphic drawing.

Adel Saghir has recently begun to return to figurative art which was the basis of his first academic works. This can be seen in his preference for painting nudes and representing the environment of his intimate life, his studio for example.