Article: An Exploration of Self through the Experience of War 
by Sulaf Zakharia September 2008

'I am part of a generation of artists and writers who lived 20 years of it and don't have anything to say but about war.'

Ayman Baalbaki was born in 1975, the year the Lebanese Civil War started. It is, therefore, no surprise that he draws his inspiration from war and the related themes of destruction and loss, emptiness, both emotional and physical, retribution and the identity of the victim. Intensely personal and highly cohesive, his latest exhibition at Beirut's Agial Gallery is marked by the same candor and vulnerability that has defined his previous shows.

In a 2006 interview, Baalbaki stated, 'The Lebanese don't want to address the issue of the war.' It is this denial that he challenges and confronts in this exhibition, in much the same way that Anselm Keifer, who clearly inspires his style, controversially challenged Germany's collective silence on the issues of the Second World War and the Third Reich.

The exhibition is neat, almost clinically, separated into two distinct bodies of work, the portraits of dead buildings and those of masked men. Wake Up Sisyphus symbolizes the process of transition from one part of the exhibition to the other.

This brightly colored installation constitutes a gentle visual bridge between the two parts of the show. Against the backdrop of a building in downtown Beirut, colorful family belongings are packed, and along with rural pets, seem to be ready for the start of a trip. The bright blue sky filled with red flowers is reminiscent of summer holidays in the village.

However, the gaiety of the work belies its poignant autobiographical content, its darkness almost immediately betrayed by its title. Just as the ancient Corinthian king was condemned to perpetually push a rock up a hill in Hades only to have it roll down each time it reached the top, so too has Baalbaki been condemned to continual displacement every time he settles.

Baalbaki's family was forced to flee Rass-el-Dikweneh by the outbreak of civil war in 1975. He was only a few months old. They moved to Wadi Abu-Jmil in downtown Beirut, a neighborhood which became a refuge for those displaced by the war. In 1995 the Baalbakis moved out of Wadi Abu-Jmil to make way for the post-war wave of urban development and the artist experienced a sense of displacement for the first time. This time they moved to Haret Hreik. Five years later, Baalbaki moved to Paris where he lived till 2004 and continued to travel between Beirut and Paris till 2007. In 2006, the Israeli attack on Beirut destroyed Baalbaki's home in Haret Hreik along with all his belongings. It is this event that has inspired much of Baalbaki's recent art.

Abbas al Mousawi Street, Yassine Building and Untitled capture not only the physical but also the psychological devastation of the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon. Bold, almost violent neo expressionist brush strokes form dark, featureless buildings, partially or completely destroyed, devoid of life and bleeding, looming against grey skies and dominating the canvas. The plurality and the diminutive size of the paintings that make up Untitled undermine the significance of the destruction of any individual building and in so doing, underscore the true magnitude of the devastation and exacerbate the sense of loneliness and alienation. Equally devastated and devastating is the comparatively monolithic Abbas al Al Mousawi Street, Yassine Building, the subject of which was once the artist's home and studio.

Baalbaki's buildings are conspicuously devoid of human life which appears to have fled, taking up residence in the second half of his exhibition. But the humanity that emerges after the devastation has been altered by the war. The young men are either wholly or partially masked and women, children and old men are totally absent.

In Eye for an Eye, the viewer is confronted by 15 portraits of masked young men, (perhaps self-portraits), whose faces are hidden behind a variety of masks, all associated with war: the traditional kaffiyeh, the war helmet, the gas mask and the ominous hood.

Baalbaki's use of masks is a complex, multifaceted one. Unlike the classical masks of Rome and Greece, his masks obliterate facial features and thereby hide any visible indication of emotion. Instead, it is his choice of a mask that conveys the emotions hidden behind it. One does not need to see the face under the hood to know it hides unimaginable terror.

In his constant working and reworking of this motif, Baalbaki's masks have ceased to be mere devices for protection or the maintenance of anonymity. They have taken on a more fundamental function. He now uses his mask in the same was as primitive cultures used theirs, to mark a shift in a group's equilibrium, particularly in terms of its relationship to death. In this case, his masks have only emerged in the aftermath of the death and devastation of war.

The kaffiyeh figures prominently in Baalbaki's portraits. When he first started painting his kaffiyeh portraits, viewers misread the subject as Palestinians although he was painting faces that were also very much a part of the Lebanese Civil War. With the Intifada and the war in Iraq, his kaffiyeh-covered faces took on a broader Middle Eastern rather than a Lebanese or Palestinian identity. In Eye for an Eye, he presents the dichotomy of the kaffiyeh by positioning it alongside portraits of soldiers in gas masks and war helmets and war victims in hoods. Like Tarek Al-Ghoussein in his Self-Portrait Series, Baalbaki's use of the kaffiyeh is a direct challenge to the contradictory interpretations that have become attached to what was once a humble headdress used to protect the wearer's face from raging desert sands.

The portraits in this installation are mounted below a half-open shutter as if hung in a shop window. The words Eye for an Eye in Arabic script hang above the portraits, a clear demand for retribution. Part of an ongoing experiment with surfaces that have 'a local uniqueness', Baalbaki paints the shutter a bright gold, like the backdrop of a Byzantine icon, bestowing a certain beatification upon the young men with the silently defiant eyes. Perhaps he has finally answered Reem El-Jindi's question, 'Victim or terrorist?'

In God, Baalbaki once again draws inspiration from Byzantine iconography for the installation's gold background and its curved top that the he used because of its resemblance to the icon retable and the shape of a tombstone. His canvas, this time, is the top of a traditional vegetable cart. His lone figure looks up at the sky in resignation. Above him, the Big Dipper recalls a story from Arabic mythology of a funeral procession. The father, lying dead in the coffin (the pan of the Big Dipper), is followed by his sons represented by the three stars of the handle as they head in the direction of the North Star, their father's killer, to seek vengeance.

While images of images of war dominate the exhibition, to say that Ayman Baalbaki's theme is war would be a gross oversimplification. It is not the war that fascinates him, but rather its impact on the human psyche, and more specifically, his own. Despite his exploration of broad themes, Baalbaki's work remains to a large degree introspective in nature. His work poses the question, 'How has the war shaped who I am?' with as much emphasis as makes a statement of the impact on Lebanon and its people.

The art of war - Kaelen Wilson-Goldie - Last Updated: Nov 3, 2008

For more than a decade, a deep rift has divided Lebanese artists into two mutually exclusive camps. On one side are the modern painters and sculptors whose concerns are largely formal. On the other side are the contemporary video and installation artists whose motivations are most critical.

While the former camp relishes landscape, still life, figuration, symbolism and abstraction and pursues vague yet enduring notions of beauty and the sublime, the latter camp appropriates documentary, archival and research-based practices for the production of politically relevant works on such subjects as war. Coming from different art-historical and political frames of reference, the two sides seem, almost painfully irreconcilable. But a new exhibition at the Agial Art Gallery in the Hamra district of Beirut might just bridge the gap.

Ayman Baalbaki's Transfiguration Apocalyptique features 13 large-scale works and a series of 35 diminutive canvasses. Incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, assemblage and a few novel embellishments in neon, the show pays tribute to Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer and the American minimalist Keith Sonnier all at once. Baalbaki, who made his gallery debut at Agial in 2006, has taken his signature technique - paint applied in expressive brushstrokes directly onto a field of garish floral fabric - and pushed it a step further. Several of the new works break the traditional picture plane and jut out into the gallery space. Paintings with sculptural aspirations, these canvasses appear to almost reach out to the related objects that are scattered across the floor in front of them.

One piece, titled I Built My Home, features a grid of small, rectangular, floral-painted canvasses with a car rack affixed to the center, topped with luggage, sleeping bags, pots, pans and a neon sign reading "Home." Another, titled Mon Dieu! consists of a street merchant's vegetable cart tricked out in gold paint, a portrait and a set of small light bulbs arranged like the stars of the Big Dipper in the night sky. Yet another, titled An Eye for an Eye, involves a gold-painted security grate from a street-level storefront adorned with 15 portraits of men whose faces are obscured under ski masks, headscarves, helmets, army-issue gas masks or hoods reminiscent of Abu Ghraib.

But for all the bricolage and florid kitsch, Baalbaki's heavily assisted ready-mades go beyond the dizzyingly decorative. He skillfully mingles punchy, street-savvy pop with techniques borrowed from the rich history of religious iconography and illuminated manuscripts. "In Arabic and Islamic culture, we use a lot of gold," says Baalbaki. "It's tradition. The color exists in dancers' costumes, on Christian icons and in Islamic texts."

The artist's underlying themes also dig into the dark corners of Lebanon's collective psyche. Baalbaki's works reference the civil war, the economic inequities of the post-war reconstruction era and the devastation wrought by the conflict with Israel in the summer of 2006. They call attention to the vibrant visual culture of Lebanon's lower classes, which tend to be otherwise ignored by artists and political leaders alike. They also grapple with the consequences of the so-called war on terror on one hand, the rising tide of militant Islam on the other. (Several of Baalbaki's pieces in Transfiguration Apocalyptique were inspired by posters pasted around Beirut making various claims about a better future, either in this life or the next.)

Baalbaki, who is 33, was already considered a rising star, a dynamic young figure capable of breathing new life into Lebanon's long painterly tradition. Now he is both a critical and commercial success. Every work in Transfiguration Apocalyptique sold within two hours of the exhibition opening and the piece Mon Dieu! has already vanished from the gallery, having been selected by the curator Rose Issa for an exhibition at the European Parliament. Collectors previously more attuned to pretty paintings by the late Paul Guiragossian have begun buying into Baalbaki's tougher, bleaker vision.

The veteran art critic Joseph Tarrab - known for his support of Lebanon's modern masters and his indifference to the capital's contemporary conceptualists - even contributed an essay to Baalbaki's exhibition catalog. Transfiguration Apocalyptique also foreshadows a significant shake-up in Beirut's gallery system. The Agial Art Gallery opened in 1990, which makes it one of the oldest art spaces in the city. (Few of the Beirut galleries that thrived in the 1960s outlived the civil war, which lasted from 1975 through 1990.

Agial's owner and director Saleh Barakat has championed an older generation of painters and sculptors from across the Arab world for nearly two decades. But in the coming months, he is opening a new gallery in Beirut's new art district, Saifi Village. The gallery, called Maqam, will take a more methodical approach to the history of modern art in the region with plans to organise an exhibition exploring the legacy of 19th-century landscape painting in Lebanon.

Agial, meanwhile, will concentrate more forcefully on the next generation. Barakat says he is committed to establishing a sense of continuity between the two galleries, but at the same time is clearly invigorated by the idea of carving out a space for more daring, experimental work. Later this week he is unveiling a new exhibition at Agial, featuring photographs by the filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, whose themes include the buried histories of obscure Arabic texts and the changing fortunes of Orientalism. In this regard, Baalbaki's exhibition is a promising practice run.

"There is a particular frenzy about Arab art today," says Barakat. "This is a strong show that satisfies people who are into painting and people who are into contemporary art." Worth noting, he adds, is the fact that Baalbaki's work sold "piece by piece" to a range of different collectors - it was not a matter of one buyer acquiring the whole lot, or family members supporting their own. Baalbaki was born in South Lebanon in 1975, the year the civil war began. His village, Odeisse, is just south of the Beaufort Castle, spitting distance from the Israeli border. His family fled the area when he was a few months old and moved to Wadi Abu Jamil, a neighborhood in downtown Beirut that had once been a Jewish quarter. After the war ended, however, the real-estate giant Solidere transformed Wadi Abu Jamil into luxury villas and high-end apartment buildings. Baalbaki was displaced once again and moved to the southern suburb of Haret Hreik.

After completing a degree at Lebanese University's Institute of Fine Arts, Baalbaki left Beirut for Paris and continued his studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD). He is currently enrolled in a Ph.D. programme at the University of Paris 8. But, with his coursework finished, he returned to Beirut in 2006. There he set up his studio, a few floors below his family's apartment in Haret Hreik. The building, the apartment, the studio - all of them were destroyed in the war that broke out a few months later, reducing much of the southern suburbs to rubble.

One can read Transfiguration Apocalyptique, then, as a haunting autobiographical account of Baalbaki's experience. "Part of it is something I lived," he says. "But I don't want to show just what I have lived." Indeed, Baalbaki's ideas about human nature, his evocation of Sisyphus in three of the works in the show, his appropriation of pop culture and his art-historical references lend the exhibition a universal air.

At the same time, some of Baalbaki's visual tricks are more specific to Beirut than they initially appear. He describes his use of neon, for example, as a nod to the shabby glowing signage on Hamra Street. The fabrics he uses as supports come from specific shops in Ghobeiri and Sabra, popular areas are known for their cheap markets, which have, in turn, transformed the fashion sensibilities of entire communities (replacing traditional embroidery, for example, with more affordable, less labor-intensive textiles manufactured in China - globalization writ small).

As impressive as Baalbaki's large-scale works are, his smaller series of paintings, titled Tamooz (Arabic for the month of July), are perhaps his most moving. The series depicts buildings in various phases of demolition. They are powerful, poetic elegiac works. Taken together, they are also a tidy documentary record of a summer's singular sorrows. "It's like an archive," says Baalbaki with a quick shrug of his shoulders, but it's actually more than that. In this work, Baalbaki has proven himself a mediator bringing the far-flung camps of the conceptualists and formalists together - creating probing conceptual work with a dash of formalist flair.