La Lecture

Fatima El-Hajj's works are often reminiscent of the artist's visual memories of the many parks and gardens in all the cities she visited whilst travelling across Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco and France. Her palette and her memory preserve the liveliness of the shapes, colours and light from these places and their inhabitants. More often, her paintings are a reflection of her own garden which she had laid out in front of her studio in Rmaileh, Lebanon, in some ways similar to how Claude Monet created his garden in Giverny and made it the main subject matter for his paintings during the last thirty years of his life. Yet Fatima El-Hajj's garden is much more modest and different by nature than that of the Impressionist master. She endlessly paints the countless facets of her interior garden filled with silence and beauty, such as in the present work, La lecture, where the silhouette of a woman lost in her reading and contemplation emerges from the blazing yellow and orange brushstrokes, generously covering the canvas. El-Hajj wants her paintings to be an invitation for the viewer to seek out their own interior garden, a paradise which is within us and brings us serenity, beauty and enchantment. The subject matter and the rich luminous colours radiating from the painting's surface in La lecture are also a homage to the artists Fatima El-Hajj admires: Edouard Vuillard with his many depictions of intérieur scenes, Henri Matisse with his Fauvist palette, and especially Pierre Bonnard with his iconic painting L'Atelier au mimosa of 1939-1946, currently in the collections of Modern Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, a work which similarly overflows with such dazzling warm colours. By following the steps of these colourist masters, she also reveals her respect and admiration for her teacher, the great Lebanese painter Shafic Abboud, who seems to have passed on to her his love for colour and for texture of paint.