If Russian painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky is right, then there is no must in art, because it’s free. This has been the cornerstone of art for aeons – the freedom to express oneself without sparing a thought for the sneering proletariat.
By Dean Williams

Art knows no boundaries, be it social or cultural. In the myriad brushstrokes that make up a masterpiece lie the trails of man’s history: His sense of innovation and a graphic representation of his intuition and instinct.

“What is artistic innovation? What is artistic creation?”, asks Lebanese painter Wajih Nahlé.

”As science controls one’s mind to meet man’s materialistic requirements, art also controls the depths of human emotions. So art is a vast space within the inner self. Art is the shining sparkle reflecting the mind’s contribution.”

Nahlé believes that in abstract terms, art is a sea of fog whose secrets are unravelled whenever you sail against its waves or when you dive in it and touch its bed. He is to this day still crawling and anxiously trying to swim in this sea.

In a sense, art is our personal battle against dogma; diktats born of society, not often in conformity with the human condition. Our thirst for the unknown is a brutal search for that which cannot be found, epitomising the passions of art.

”In art the process of innovation starts off with adventure and travel in the world of the unknown when you take a close look and concentrate on the white canvas,” says Nahlé.

“When you concentrate on the depth of meditation, interact, react and dissolve, you spontaneously enjoy the pleasure of the emotional relationship between the conscious and subconscious. This process attracts all your powers and your inner feelings to gradually release you from the materialistic world to the spiritual world. You gradually get to see faint pictures that either move in a confused way or clearly at other times. The process involves mixing your colours spontaneously and nervously when you first touch the canvas and begin the adventure.”

So then is art mere trepidation? Faltering steps bringing you ever nearer the abyss? Nahlé seems to think so: “In fact, you do not know how to launch your adventure in this mysterious and unknown world, as though sailing in a small and single boat from an endless shore in the horizon when the fog is thick. You set off on your adventure with soft and gentle touches. Then, you gently touch with your brush the canvas that at times becomes hard and at other times tender. You try to create all the noble feelings with a will that is mixed with the freedom of relationship. It is a freedom of sailing in the world of the unknown. At this very moment, you get the sparkle of innovation that is produced by the wealth of innovation charged with strong emotions, senses and bliss from experiencing the total integration from breaking free, to the state of overwhelming obsession.”

Adonis, a poet, when writing about Nahlé and his works said: “Once you look at Wajih Nahlé’s paintings, you feel as if he uses the body of words to take you to the beginnings. Then, he tears this body apart and leaves its parts scattered and goes on to mix them together, makes them contrast against each other or keeps them together.”

Vincent van Gogh once said, “You can’t be at the pole and the equator at the same time. You must choose your own line, as I hope to do, and it will probably be colour.”

When Henry Zughaib wrote about Nahlé in his A Dictionary with a New Alphabet he said that he [Nahlé] seemed to paint with light. “His brush seems in his fingers like a lighthouse that carries colours in a magic of creation. His rich imagination has a broad horizon that is conveyed to the white canvas that can hardly cope with the space. It breaks the finite horizon into a light that has an unlimited extent and is not besieged by any frame.”

Zughaib also asks: “Where does his painting start and where does it end?”
He calls it Nahlé’s artistic alphabet, but one that remains coded. “It is quite likely that anyone can try to look at the mystery that remains and cannot be decoded except by him,” he writes.

“From the artistic alphabet to the dervishes, there are sighs of beauty moving on the white canvas to turn the canvas into a song made of a melody of colour through which run the lines that remain bright, because the colour is faster than a line and a line is faster than a letter. Here the letter is no longer part of a word but has become, at times, the whole word.”

The letters will continue to conjure imagery from the flamboyant to the melancholic. They draw a language that only the mind can decipher … a singular harmonic that no society or boundary can ever shackle.

That is the magic of Wajih Nahlé’s work


Master painter Wajih Nahlé was born in 1932 in Beirut, Lebanon, where he made his career debut in 1952. He has held many positions including Lebanese Commissair of International Biennal of Arts, founder of the Union of Arab Artists, and member of the International Artists Association of France, among others. Nahlé’s artistic innovation was marked by various exhibitions and acknowledged by multiple awards in Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Kuwait, Paris, New York and Belgium. His heritage is five children, artists who have art as their sole motivation: Wahid, Gina, Lina, Joumana and Marwan Nahlé.