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The great surprise, when one comes across Shafic Abboud's works, is the feeling, unusual nowadays, of being in the presence of a painting that is spontaneous, warm-hearted, often luxuriant, in which the thrust of a vehement inspiration is constantly confronted with the requirements of a very sure-footed technique. Between simplification and the outpourings, that are the two paths of abstract painting, Abboud offers another approach to reality that is fusion. It might be said in a rather drastic way, that he does not perceive reality but that he dives into it, wallows in it, merges with it, to such an extent that, when he brings it back to us filtered through his desire, it has simultaneously been dissolved and reconstituted according to harmonic laws inside which, to quote the poet, perfumes, colours and sounds answer each other. It is quite deliberately that, along with colours, which he uses so gracefully, I mention sounds and perfumes. For while it is true that each of his paintings appears orchestrated like a sonata or a fugue, it is equally true that it brings to mind a notion of fragrance, so much that his landscapes, his interiors, his still lives, seemed to me like so many scenes borrowed from what Charles Fourier called the scented life. The Orient is within us, no doubt, but Shafic Abboud's Orient is also his childhood, whose faraway pulsions spring up here and there in his paintings to endow them with the brilliance of the Thousand and One Nights. When he gazes upon the vegetal symphonies of the Parc Montsouris beside which he has lived for so many years, I would not be surprised to hear that he came across in it the myrrh tree, whose bark breaks open to give birth to the god Adonis. Long ago, that event was celebrated by feasts, and who knows if it is not in remembrance of those feasts, that Shafic Abboud performs, combining, for our greater pleasure, fragments of forgotten joys with the lively fragments of a transfigured reality."
(Patrick Waldberg, in Claude Lemand (ed.) Shafic Abboud, Paris, pp. 349-350)