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Lot Essay
The artist Elie Kanaan is a major force for the Lebanese modern art movement, painting expressive and gestural works bordering between abstract and figurative that intertwine colour and form into a delicate and perfectly harmonious composition. The present work depicts a beautiful and intimate landscape work, conjuring happier and nostalgic times before the civil war making this a hauntingly beautiful work.
In the present work, Kanaan uses a pastel, monochromatic colored palette, with a great outburst of red dominating much of the canvas. The depicted scene illustrates the delicate interplay of colours in relation to light and shadow within the sky, sea and the nearby forest. A fragile canopy of leaves provides the only figurative reference of framework, with light touches of reds and oranges that hang over the poetically colored reservoir beneath it. The sky’s reflection against the sea is accumulated in the middle of the composition to where one’s focus of attention gravitates, representing the most colourful and poetic part of the canvas with small touches of intersecting horizontal and vertical color planes that fade in and out within a continuum of reds and pinks. The origins of this present scene are unclear, and yet the mysterious yet balanced layout signifies an auspicious dimensionality that acts as a harbinger for existentialist notions.
Painted a few years before the Lebanese civil war, this painting captures a poignant and tranquil moment felt by the artist and those of that time before the ensuing violence, chillingly echoing a longing for the country’s better past. It was during this time that Kanaan was teaching drawing and painting at the College Notre Dame de Jamhour and at the Lebanese University and ALBA. A few years before this, Kanaan was awarded the Prix Vendome in 1967, solidifying his presence in the European art community, following his fellowship in Paris studying at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière.
In the present work, Kanaan uses a pastel, monochromatic colored palette, with a great outburst of red dominating much of the canvas. The depicted scene illustrates the delicate interplay of colours in relation to light and shadow within the sky, sea and the nearby forest. A fragile canopy of leaves provides the only figurative reference of framework, with light touches of reds and oranges that hang over the poetically colored reservoir beneath it. The sky’s reflection against the sea is accumulated in the middle of the composition to where one’s focus of attention gravitates, representing the most colourful and poetic part of the canvas with small touches of intersecting horizontal and vertical color planes that fade in and out within a continuum of reds and pinks. The origins of this present scene are unclear, and yet the mysterious yet balanced layout signifies an auspicious dimensionality that acts as a harbinger for existentialist notions.
Painted a few years before the Lebanese civil war, this painting captures a poignant and tranquil moment felt by the artist and those of that time before the ensuing violence, chillingly echoing a longing for the country’s better past. It was during this time that Kanaan was teaching drawing and painting at the College Notre Dame de Jamhour and at the Lebanese University and ALBA. A few years before this, Kanaan was awarded the Prix Vendome in 1967, solidifying his presence in the European art community, following his fellowship in Paris studying at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière.