The artist and professor at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lebanon painted the scattered buildings of Beirut in ruins, where the spaces are narrow and its dark colors penetrate the traces of rubble and torn- torn doors and windows. Destruction, fragmentation and holes, as if a human eye appeared from it, indicating a tragic loss. On the other hand, his pen is spoiled by nature, which has always been for him charm, inspiration, light and silence. Here his paintings are bright in colors and lights, with color saturation and different textures. But until now, careless, this beauty of nature has left the explosion of the city, which is enveloped in darkness and death, and human bodies are scattered on the streets and in its houses, mixed with piles of stone, dust and blood. Dark colors cross this storm before it loses its breath and rushes towards the beautiful memory of the motherland, its calm, beautiful nature, with different means of expression between acrylic, acrylic, oil, pastel and gouache, soothing the weary soul. The exhibition is mainly abstract-impressionistic in nature. Knowing that Maroun al-Hakim was the son of a harsh village surrounded by nature, he never became a painter of rural nature, because he was the same force of a city boy who refused to become a painter and sculptor in the city that no emotion. Thanks to his many years of experience, he controls the relationship of materials to each other. His experience is not limited to sculpting, where wood and metal intersect, but also to painting. The artist uses empty jars on top of his paintings to create a mix of color, composition and sculpture for different subjects, forms and content. The colors are between bright and dark, style between realistic and abstract, and the themes between nature and silence, death and eternity, bridging the gaps between contradictions to create their expressive unity.
Maroun Al-Hakim is honest in his artistic expression, flexible, and we feel his pleasure when he moves between states, colors and shapes in the picture, while he is firm and bolder when he holds a chisel for carve a stone or a tree. He did not dare to avoid the censorship of the figurative “text” but to see where his artistic adventure would take him. For more than forty years, he moved between painting and sculpture. A child of virtue, he shares the aesthetic wealth that he possesses, and at every step there is an effort between them and an intrusion of the unknown, which he aims to tame or indulge in a silent journey with his beloved forms . In his hand is the firmness of a master, driven by rational analytical reasoning. His gaze quickly grasps, crosses objects and meanings, passes through the middle of the place, as if passing through a wild forest, which does not leave confidence, but ignites the artistic instinct. Mental strength polished, decorated with decorative indentations. A mysterious feeling permeates painting and sculpture, and the latter tends to attract the eye of the beholder. Maroun al-Hakim’s attitude towards his sculptures can be said to be “deadly”, whether in marble, ordinary stone, colored stone or wood.
The colors are between bright and dark, the style is between realistic and abstract, and the themes are between nature and silence, death and destruction.
The experiment continues, the search for the final form continues. Sculpture has a special status in the path of Marun al-Hakim, who reached the “engraved panel” to establish a connection between pen and cutter, between color and material.
Final impression or final comment: A patch of color on a hard material such as stone, seashell, etc. is meant to protect, decorate, or disguise. As for the painting, it is a purposeful aesthetic addition, equivalent to what is seen in the color composition of the painting and its balances, to create a different aesthetic effect, reminiscent of a mole on a woman’s face, seductive and seductive. the stain reflects a particular artistic taste and corresponding aesthetic use. However, some color spots do not find their right place, causing the opposite effect, which spoils the picture, and this is what we can accept from Maroon Al-Hakim in some of his paintings.
The soft, wet, fertile hand of Maroun al-Hakim refuses to be light and stubbornly pursues the vision and can sometimes rebel. The expressive charge and smoothness of the lines leave no void in the work of Maroon Al-Hakim, who has been actively present in the Lebanese plastic movement from the mid-seventies of the last century to the present.
* “How is my country”: until August 6 – “Art at 56 Gallery” (Gemez – Beirut) – for information: 01/570331
Source: Al-Akhbar
