Conversing with dead artists at the feast of the damned
Abraaj prize-winner Sahmarani talks about being a Middle Eastern painter

Daily Star Thursday, April 01, 2010

Interview
Matthew Mosley

Daily Star staff

  BEIRUT: The night before Good Friday in the year 1300, Italian poet Dante began his (fictional) journey through the nine circles of hell. In 1620, Rubens completed his vast, apocalyptic vision of the fate of sinners, “The Fate of the Damned.” At Art Dubai, in March, Marwan Sahmarani positioned his Abraaj Capital Prize-winning work as the third leg in this infernal lineage.

“During every process I have a painter with me in the studio,” Sahmarani said over coffee earlier this week. “This time I felt I was engaged in conversation with Rubens. I’m also inspired by literature and was reading Dante’s ‘Inferno’ as I made this work.”

The Abraaj Capital Art Prize, now in its second year, offers a princely sum of $1 million, split among three artists from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (MENASA) region and their respective curators. The prize money effectively acts as a commission for a finished piece that is unveiled as part of Art Dubai.

With his curatorial helpmate Mahita al-Bacha Urieta, Sahmarani produced “The Feast of the Damned,” an installation that combines all four elements of his practice: Painting, drawing, ceramics and performance.

“We wanted to create a certain kind of spiritual space,” he said. “In a church or a mosque there is an overwhelming feeling of decoration. The inside is like a protective membrane.”

As its name might suggest, “The Feast of the Damned,” does not revel in heavenly visions of salvation. Inside a black room, the ceiling is painted in flaming shades of orange and pink. Alarming figures – a naked man with a dog’s head clutching two disrobed women – loom over spectators’ heads.

Arrayed on the walls are strips of paper splattered with lurid greens and purples, showing disjointed body parts and gaping animal carcasses. Classically-formed pots are adorned with entangled splayed bodies, reminiscent of the lumpy cascade of nudes in Rubens’ “The Fate of the Damned.”

A large ovoid screen plays a video that seems to display a loinclothed Sahmarani hung by his feet while being splattered with paint.

“I wanted to explore what is hell and what’s not hell,” he said. “In some ways, I believe that heaven is what we’re living right now. Hell is the creation of the artist. It comes from some kind of friction with demons.”

This isn’t to say that Sahmarani doesn’t enjoy the process of artistic creation. He describes his practice as an almost mystical experience.

“I leave my thoughts at the door of the studio,” he explained. “It’s like meditation. I’m surrounded by the ghosts of other artists.”

Winning the Abraaj Capital Art Prize caused something of an upheaval in Sahmarani’s methodology. The winners were announced in October 2009, leaving artists a window of around six months to project their proposal into reality.

“It takes a long time to produce a painting,” he said. “The work needs time to digest. In six months, you don’t have the eye to see what is good and what needs changing.

“Picasso’s painting ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ was in his studio for 10 years before it was exhibited. The art scene now has this emphasis on ‘Let’s do, let’s show.’ This isn’t how I normally work.”

Sahmarani’s exhibition roster is relatively small for an artist who has been in the business for near on 20 years. Growing up in Lebanon, Sahmarani left for Paris at the end of the 1980s to study fine art at the Ecole Superieure d’Art Graphique. After spending time in New York, he settled in Montreal, ceasing to exhibit at all in the late 1990s.

In recent years, Sahmarani has been the subject of a mid-career retrospective at Beirut’s Fadi Mogabgab gallery and in 2007 showed a series called “Can You Teach Me How to Fight?” at The Third Line Gallery in Dubai. He returned to live in Beirut two years ago.

“So many of my works are very personal,” Sahmarani said. “I don’t want to show them to the public. I’m constantly re-working old paintings. But sometimes, it feels like it’s time to show the paintings to other people, to hear what they have to say.”

Perhaps due to his medium, Sahmarani feels in a different zone from much of the contemporary art world. He sees an emphasis on media such as video and photography to be at the expense of more traditional forms.

“The paintings at Art Dubai – I’ll be honest – were very few and very bad,” Sahmarani said. “But much of the rest of the art was like looking at a newspaper. There’s no dream, no poetry. I can’t see the point of art like this.”

He believes that many of the actors of the international contemporary art world have lost the ability to look at paintings.

“Gallery owners are always looking for the next big thing,” he said, becoming animated, “so they can’t get interested in painting at all.

“One gallerist walked into my installation and said, ‘This is very Greco-Roman – nothing new. But I suppose people like that,’ and walked out again.

“If I go to see a painting in a museum I’ll spend half an hour standing in front of one painting. Many of these people don’t even know what a museum is.”

This attitude toward the art world meant Sahmarani’s win was a big surprise.

“I had a project in mind and I needed the means,” he said, “but wasn’t really expecting anything. I’m a black sheep and I feel lucky about this – I’m not molded by the perceptions of art fairs.

“But as an artist, you have to be somewhere. If you’re not in an art fair you’re in a gallery. If you’re not in a gallery you’re on the internet.”

As well as the vagaries of the art scene, Sahmarani also feels tetchy about the perceptions of Middle Eastern art that he believes are imposed by Western audiences.

“It’s irritating that when the West looks at Arab artists,” he said, “they already know what they want to see. They want images of war or car-bombings. They can’t accept that we might be inspired by European artists, for example. Does Damien Hirst have these problems? Did Francis Bacon?”

That said, war has reared its head in Sahmarani’s oeuvre. “Can You Teach Me How to Fight?” took a decorative look at the conflicts that have scarred this region of the world throughout history.

“As an artist with a legacy of war,” he said, “I felt I had to confront these issues. Now I’m finished with that. But it was a relief to make beautiful paintings about this, to concentrate on the subject and not the message.”

One of Sahmarani’s war works, “The Nights’ Hunters” of 2005, is about to go on display in Washington DC’s American University Museum as part of the “Convergence” exhibition. Three gun-toting men peer over a corpse amid rippling sheets of purple and gold, as though reflected in an oil-slicked puddle.

Having been awarded a large chunk of change for his work, it’s not unnatural to wonder what’s next for Sahmarani’s work.

“Everyone asks that,” he laughed, “but I can’t tell you.”

Perhaps Sahmarani himself doesn’t know. Sahmarani describes painting as “like a rally – you don’t know where you’re going.”

Presumably, Sahmarani is involved in a new dialogue with one of his long-dead heroes – Goya or Picasso, Soutine or Michaelangelo. And despite painting’s unfashionable status in the contemporary art scene, Sahmarani’s Abraaj award means that a lot of people will have their eye on his next move.

For more information on

Sahmarani’s work, visit

www.sahmarani.com