Charles Khoury.. Abstraction tells
Whoever saw Charles Khoury’s exhibition in Beirut a few months ago, will not feel that he is absent from the painting. He will not feel that behind it is that general abstract model, which was formed from the beginnings of abstract painting through its renaissance and spread. He will not see the abstract game alone, as is often the case when we enter today in our country to an abstract exhibition. At that time, we are facing what can be considered an abstract exercise, which could be an example that descends from the entire history of abstraction. In that case, the perfection of the painting does not matter much, as long as it does not carry any privacy with it, as long as it does not die except to an artistic summary, except to a relative pattern, except to a type only.
We cannot, in this case, which is repeated often, prevent ourselves from looking at the painting as a coordination, as an arrangement of colors and lines. This is what leads to the emergence of a void between the viewer and the abstract painting, in Lebanon, and perhaps other surrounding countries. We enter Charles Khoury’s exhibition with this caution and this distrust, with this fear that we will find a painting that is nothing more than painting upon painting, nothing more than a repetition of history, nothing more than a game on style, on a model and on a style. But that is not the case in this experiment.
The painting, which surprises us, does not go back to history and does not extract its composition from it. Charles Khoury’s painting is abstract, we don’t say that, except to distinguish its general face and horizon. It’s abstraction without being just a game of abstraction, just pattern, just arrangement. The painting is abstract but that is not all it says, and all it shows. It starts here, but it doesn’t stop there. Don’t turn it into rehearsing it, and that won’t be the end of it. Charles Khoury’s painting is originally abstract, but that is not all, rather abstraction is not alone here. It is intertwined with other destinations.
He draws from art everything that is adjacent to abstraction, and what precedes and accompanies it
Art in his painting derives from art everything that is adjacent to abstraction, and what precedes and accompanies it. Rather, we are in front of the abstract painting, and we feel that it somehow revives abstraction and revives it, as if it extracts from it and adds to it, what changes its rhythm, what makes it a second horizon, what mixes abstraction with something else and something else. The painting here may bring us back to the abstract legacy. We may suspect, here, here and there, of Kandinsky, but the painting is not exactly Kandinsky. It is Charles Khoury to the same degree, but it is Charles Khoury more sometimes. This means that abstraction here speaks with another voice, that the painting here has something like its narration. The painting here is far more or less abstract. It almost seems like a conflict, a story, and an internal dynamism.
It also has what could be singing, and a successive rhythm. Not only because the painting sometimes carries diagnostic signs, such as finding, on one side of it, a drawing of a bird or a child. It has something that makes us feel that someone is speaking in the painting, that another game is adjacent and mixing abstraction. Behind the pattern and the structure, we find what pertains to a story, to suffering, and to a song. That is, we find something like revealing, almost a monologue, and an epic epic. The painting thus tends from abstraction to a diagnosis to a kind of implicit and hidden diagnosis. The painting is like this drawing and lines as much as it is colored, even in colors it does not abstain from speaking, even in colors there is revelation and there is a psychological and emotional dimension.
Here we can refer to the rhythm of the lines, to the mixing of painting with painting, and sometimes its dominance over it. We can refer, in particular, to what the black does in the space of the painting, the black who is at the bottom of the painting, or he forms a special floor at the time. Thus, we find in it a kind of sentimentality, suffering, and inner depth, and what looks like a dramatic season. Thus, the abstraction in Charles Khoury’s painting almost tells, almost sings as well, but the painting appears with him, in many cases, closer to a poem. Color like this, with lines and drawings added to it, is not just a juxtaposition of colours.
The matter is more than that, in the colors here what seems to be insides and depths, in the colors what is an actual drama, what is a narrative, and what is an internal anthem. This is how Charles Khoury has his abstraction, which stands on the brink of expression, close to diagnosing the various sources, directions and rhythms, a diagnosis. The important thing is that Charles Khoury’s painting has its own language and style. As we enter from abstraction, we feel that what comes out of it transcends it, infusing it with another spirit.
* My Lebanese poet