Article: In front of Mario Saba’s work, we face a splitting enthusiasm, a kind of metamorphosis, which invites us to leave our galaxy and meet what befalls.

It’s an overwhelming kind of metamorphosis. It’s a world with multiple junctions.

Mario Saba is a roving ambassador joining sketches of the world, lapses of time lost and found then saved again; wandering colors, which invade us.

Dazzled by this presence, we are on the verge of collapsing. We are shattered between the nostalgia of the past and the appeal of the future.

Facing us is Venus: symbol of desire often used by artist in spite distance. It’s a compact materialist distance; a division of the night, which stretches out, shrinks back, evades and excites.

While looking, we are shiver: the technical world is scathing, its objects seem sparkling, they break and scatter the wear and tear of time.

Mario Saba’s work hides what is known, what is familiar to us and which secures us by its apathy and while doing so it cleaves our routine with its materials, colors, forms and textures.
It creates this cleavage in a world where the substance is delivered from its function, a coming back to the object itself.

Objects, forms, and colors are borrowed and diverted of their world, of their origin (empirical, historical) and thus, they are saved.

Therefore, this transmutation of violence is performed thanks too the intensity of a revival, to the dynamism of this artist who breaks the coherence of a world which seemed understandable to us because we gave up to the laziness of obviousness.

Mario Saba’s path opens new horizons where he explores and sounds frontier zones at the furthermost bounds of what we call art, new horizons which trigger disconcerting feelings.

A path with a lot of energy in constant quest of new forms.

By multiplying the signs of civilization, by pushing them to the extreme edge; the swing and become age-old; they are echoes of pain of life.

To learn the patience of a forthcoming birth is a way of gathering the shattered time.

Throughout Mario Saba’s work, most of all in his links with the world’s fragments, we can notice the problems of life, the echoes of war, the balance of disaster, the power of phenomena and the real cleaved life.

This powerful work is manifold.

It invites us to overcome what is obvious.

It courageously challenges our presuppositions and takes us off our ordinary path. That’s why it is troubling and dazzling altogether.

Charles Dick

Article: Hard-Hitting Tools of Communication Daily Star, June 6, 1997

Near the sea in Mina, Tripoli, stands a work of art composed of 70 computer components and 40 chairs. The jumble of monitors, keyboards, chairs, hard drives, printers and wiring connections, all caught in a cyclonic curve of grey cement, rises seven meters up into the sea-salted air. 

The artist, Mario Saba, says it is a ''conceptual sculpture'' intended to comment on those amazing tools of communication that increasingly penetrate every corner of our lives. For want of a better interpretation, I would say it was a technological tower of Babel designed for worship in the new millennium. 

Far up in the mountains above Tripoli, stretching across ten meters of wall space in the piano bar of the Ehden Country Club, is another impressive Saba. Here, the collaged materials are softer in substance and completely at ease in the dark bacchanal interior.

Obviously, Mario Saba loves to work big. He also has a passion for unusual materials. Like seven-centimeter ten penny nails, for instance. 
Imagine them, dozens upon dozens of them, jutting out from the walls at Gallery Epreuve d'Artiste, where he is currently exhibiting. Imagine receiving (if you didn't) one of these nails taped to the invitation card sent out for the exhibition. 

To me, such formal presentation of one single nail, made without comment or explanation, demanded full attention. Look at me, the nail said. Look at my iron hardness; look at the severity of my hand-chiseled angles; feel the penetrating force of my tip. I, too, possess power and beauty. 

Aggressive, yes. A phallic symbol, maybe (so many things are, you know). But watch out. Don't turn your back and chance impalement against the wall. Mario Saba of the soft brown eyes does not intend to hurt, but his nails are indeed sharp and scary. 

Born in Tripoli 35 years ago and introduced to art by a father whose favorite pastime was painting, Mario Saba left for Moscow on a scholarship in 1980 to study architecture. Three years later, he left architecture and entered the World of underground Russian art.
In a baptismal experience that shaped his commitment and indelibly altered his thinking on art, he spent the next three years in close contact with artists who worked in hidden ateliers, without public support and with no opportunity to exhibit what they produced. He also played a lot of chess - the national pastime in Russia, he says. 

Upon his return to Tripoli in 1986 and perhaps still somewhat hesitant to make a total, exclusive commitment, Saba decided to study psychology at the Lebanese University. During his two years there, he also became the campus catalyst in launching the university's program of art and theater activities.

To support himself - and further feed his curious, searching mind - he produced computerized animations for TV commercials, designed book covers and magazine layouts and taught art. He also set up his own workshop, on Mutran Street in Tripoli, and in 1991 began exhibiting the strange, original fruits of his imagination. 

In producing them, Mario Saba reaches far beyond mere paint and brush and utilizes his overpowering interest in the aesthetic potential of ''found objects.'' Like a child let loose in an attic full of old and useless memorabilia, his eye is mesmerized by the intrinsic shapes, textures and colors it sees. 

He does not ask why or what they mean. He simply collects the objects, as though they were private amulets of identity, and jealously adds them to the storehouse of materials out of which he fashions his art. 

His attachment to nails, he says, began three years ago when in constructing the portrait of a woman playing the piano he used small nails to anchor her wired mass of hair. Then one day, he picked up off the street the big ten penny nail that, subsequently multiplied in number, became the central motif of his current work. 

He expresses wonder and surprise at how he moved from small nails as a minor element in his work to compositions completely motivated and dominated by big nails. What does this move from small to big mean, he asks? Is it a sign of maturity… a sign of strength, of virility? 
I tried to get Saba to articulate his creative purpose, to describe his thought process in selecting and transposing such unusual materials into works of art. His response, in part, was: ''I begin working with a feeling about something that I can't exactly identify. Sometimes I feel male, aggressive, and I find a response for that in using certain materials. Sometimes I construct, and then I destruct. I don't know what it all means. I only understand my work much later, years after producing it. I look at it and it tells me that I am strange, but it also tells me that I am honest and natural. 

''I remember once reading the comment about how an artist is like someone forever trying to explain to a blind person what colors are, what they mean. When we look too hard for meaning, we lose the habit of feeling… art, both in its making and enjoyment is essentially a process of letting go.'' 

The 28 works on exhibit carry no titles. In addition to the ten penny nails protruding from most of them, the mixed media includes acrylic paints and resins, plaster, cement, sand, wood, string and a variety of rusted metal fragments. 

Viewed frontally and from a distance, the nails lose their identity. Most are painted to serve as pin-point color notes in the overall design, which is most often minimal in character and austere in chromatic expression. Saba's compositional strength – bold and elegant – derives from the pure balance of his colors fields, from his almost mathematical placement of contrasting blacks, greys, ochres and whites. 

In some of the pieces, Saba departs from the controlled simplicity of design and loads his brush (or knife) with the impulsive freedom of abstract expressionist emotion. In these, soft tonalities of blue and green voice an unexpected romanticism. 

Actually, the nails enter our vision only when we move in for a closer look, or when we happen to get a side view of their repeated aggressive protrusions. The play of thin-line shadows cast by Saba's studied placement of the nails is intended to change as the light changes, promising the intriguing prospect of kinetic motion. 

It is here at close quarters, however, that I was inclined to seek meaning in the nails. Looking at them, I remembered the lines of a poem from decades ago that went something like ''the day's as sharp as its angles are, but the nights are soft and round.'' 
Is this perhaps what Mario Saba is saying? Are his nails symbolic pricks of soul pain in the vulnerable pincushions of our flesh? 
I asked for his comment on one white-on-white piece, in which a handful of nails were half buried, as though slumbering, in a pool of grey dreams. He said, ''A very peaceful one, isn't it?''