Article: Painter of the Human and nature.

Rachid Wehbi is a great name in contemporary Lebanese art. He is one of the most brilliant pioneers in that field. From his works, we can see clearly the new developments in Lebanese painting and understand how it attained a much richer standard in the art and in beauty.

This standard is well revealed in a number of artistic features, one of the most important of which is the artistic concern in what is called the play of abstraction (jeu d’abstraction). Where we see Rachid Wehbi follow a personal and a unique course -an original one indeed. In it he pays special attention to the firm relation between the two elements of art- namely the abstract and the concrete, using the concrete in the service of the abstract, with the consideration that the abstract is the basic subject for the artistic activity. Thus the painting becomes a piece of a splendid abstract fabric woven with a concrete tangible material, which enriches it with a complex and unique feature. It actually displays and combines together realistic, impressionist, and abstract elements.

One of the characteristic features of Wehbi’s paintings is the way he is influenced by the two aspects of life-the objectivity and the subjectivity. These two movements combine together in one artistic unit which penetrates throughout the painting in line with the laws of growth and development. Thus the painting stands out as a living being completely built. Furthermore one feels in it the impulse of life beating in a way of harmony which brings it to the level of poetry.

From the purely technical aspects, there is projected in the paintings of Rachid Wehbi his great ability in the usage of the method of condensation and concentration. He treats this matter in an artistic way comparable to the elements of rhetoric in literary art.

Rachid Wehbi is also concerned about the importance of the value and strength of unity and about the organic adherence of the general abstract fabric of the painting to the extent that it becomes difficult to see a boundary or a limit to the ends of any color, or form, or shade, or light, except where the boundary reveals a meaning to an expression or to an artistic feature which is intended.

Finally one should mention Whebi’s love for elegance and sobriety in formulating the expression in form and colour in a very subtle and artistic way.

These are the most important artistic and aesthetic features which characterize the paintings of our great Lebanese artist, and which have paved the road for him to attain the well- deserved high position which he holds in the field of art in Lebanon. They have also made his works the forerunners of the new sound and serious movement in the Lebanese art of painting.

Radwan Chahal