Article: Samir Abi Rached, a painter ahead of his time by Jean-Claude Morin, Paris 1997

Like all exceptional painters, Samir Abi Rached is hard to define. It’s even more difficult at first sight, even if we were tempted, to consider him a surrealistic painter. From the surrealism, he has all the characteristics: the spontaneity of “writing”, the unusual aspect of sight, freedom left according to the chances of associations.

The conception of his paintings doesn’t seem premeditated; it is visible that at the moment of creation, the imagination has prevailed over all other abilities and because of that, the surrealists claim that he’s one of them. But the use of the word “surrealism” awakes in the spirit a bundle of influences and references, which we are accustomed to seek from the Occident, and that would risk enclosing the paintings of Samir Abi Rached inside an inappropriate grid.

In fact, if Samir Abi Rached testifies to something, it’s the presence of a collective unconscious that no frontier could delimit and that he could have given it his oriental color.

However, we quickly notice that the images of the unconscious, which Breton wishes for “without destination”, reach this painter in an intense awareness of reality to which they bring a hallucinating illumination.

Therefore, Samir Abi Rached is truly a painter ahead of his time: even though he formulates a diagnosis of the most severe, he projects the vision- compensating vision, reassuring vision that fills up the abyss with a very lucid look. Therefore we understand the presence, in most paintings, of those “gaps” towards a better world, of those beautiful spaces towards Dawn that maybe no longer has the rose fingers of the Odyssey but baby hands.

Over there, in Samir Abi Rached, it’s a reflection, a citadel, a promise. It is also the project itself of the painter: to help us see, through a hideous reality, the soft appearance of the distance.

The real and the imaginary, formerly two fighting brothers, are blending from now on, they are melting in a strange marriage to give birth for a new being, similar to this sea, always repainted in the landscapes of Samir Abi Rached, and which is able to carry the cry of those drowning, as well as to deliver the hope of those saved on the new shores. After the flood, we see and hear nothing but the sea, but this time it has joined the land, forming with it a marvelous break in front of which mankind exclaims.

To a question asked by a poet, to know if the “beautiful today” will end up blowing away all soarings, all impetus that have failed to pull away from the birdlime of reality, Samir Abi Rached replies with an act of faith. Yet, from this reality, with a palette all bristling with harshness, severities and asperities, he narrated the drama and the traps. The immense serenity of the shores is threatened by the index forever erecting of the mountains, or by the severed but constantly growing and constantly voracious neck of a flora similar to the Lernaean Hydra. Odd are the relationships like those maintained by the man and the woman in this adventure: It’s to whom to retain the other in their nets or their cavities.

Define Samir Abi Rached? This attempt is even more difficult, once we have accompanied this painter in his journey. If we say he is a painter, and of high stature, because he has visions, terrific and splendid visions, we would not be defining him; we would be underestimating the truth.