Dédé Hourani

INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED VISUAL ARTIST

As an internationally renowned visual artist, Dédé Hourani’s approach draws her close to those who champion a new figuration. The images she proposes are not realistic; they are reconstructions of a certain reality in which emotion and distance, the incommunicable and the suggested, are intertwined.

A WORLD OF REPRESENTATION BETWEEN THE IMAGINARY AND THE PERCEPTIVE

Human beings and elements of nature are present in her works. These beings bear witness to the drama of the human condition, beings that inhabit memory. For her, the antagonism between realism and expressionism holds no meaning. In each work, she endeavors to recount the journey of her sensations and feelings through themes charged with strong symbolic potential in lyrical abstraction.

She possesses a keen sense of calligraphic play and a mastery of the pleasing effects of color contrasts.

Her work reflects a taste for space and the cosmos, as well as interpretations of musical compositions by great composers and poems by renowned poets. Yet her creations develop according to a strict order within a well-defined architectural framework.

Dédé Hourani is a painter of sensations and unexpected encounters. In her works, she boldly endeavors to make judicious use of diverse materials, extracting them from their raw materiality (except in sculpture), and drawing from them, through a mastered craft, a construction of all the figurative elements that enter into aesthetic circulation.

What this painter-artist offers through her production is her capacity for calligraphic play and her love of material. Her approach is rooted in the logic of forces, deep truths, and events that mark destiny. Each work is a contained harmony — not closed, always open in its itineraries, yet defined by the waves of its pulsation. From the formal emerge all the elements of a virtual space, or those of inner visions illustrating states of mind. A great emotionality is expressed in the observation the image gives us, which no longer has any references but itself, at the threshold of legibility, passing — through forms, silhouettes, elements, signs, color harmonies and their light, and graphic plays that invade space — from the already seen to what has not yet been contemplated, from what is yet to be to what has already passed.

Dédé’s painting captures the simultaneously ephemeral and permanent character of its subjects. The translation of compositions at the level of structure suggests an optical order that depends not on a model or a rule, but rather on a relationship established between the imaginary and the perceptive. At times, the texture of color and light acquires an atmospheric consistency. Spaces are always shaped according to a subtle play of carefully considered correspondences.

Dédé Hourani’s output reflects a search for indescribable expression and a passion for color. She does not exhaust herself in common imagery, but continues to explore an art toward which she has turned without illusion — an art in which a balance between reason and instinct can be discerned, leaving no room for misunderstanding.

Refusing a naturalistic description, she focuses on the essence of the elements that compose the work, on the rhythms and harmonies of color. She breaks the barriers of a traditional mode of representation in order to rediscover the unity of a personal theme and expression, through which she achieves an excellent mastery of craft, creativity, and international renown.

AN ART OF WRITING AT THE CROSSROADS OF CONTEMPORARY MODES OF CONCEPTION

The author of several works in French and English — among them “The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics,” “If Trees Could Speak,” and “A Cantata for a Happy Childhood” — her structure and editorial dynamics reveal a transformation toward a poetic, nostalgic, and retrospective language, simple and progressive, inscribing the text within a living memory. The images are ordered according to a growing complexity, oscillating between past and present, to approach a singular moment: that of writing.

As the text unfolds, one discovers, through the succession of images, what a living memory truly is. This living memory is not limited to nostalgia for the past, nor to longing for cherished experiences; nor is it a simple restitution of memorable situations or events. Rather, it is engaged in a dynamic whole in perpetual transformation, where past and present combine to act mutually upon one another, evoking, in superposition, all human emotions: joy, anguish, disappointment, happiness, passion… Thus, Dédé Hourani’s past, bound to the active present, transforms ceaselessly; and as they develop, they illustrate the moments of her lived experience as they mark her memory.

An innovative and modern thought circulates through her works, lending them their full dimension. The combined doubling of events and the spatiotemporal environment within the work appears as an attempt to grasp or re-grasp the essence of places and events through all their complexities, their transformations, their contradictions.

If the past, the future, what lies ahead and behind, tend in her texts to settle upon the smooth surface of the present — through a subtle and calculated play of perspectives and approaches — it is in order to obey a space without shadow and without depth, where everything unfolds. In each work, the author endeavors to let the text speak for itself, so as to make us perceive the emotions that inhabit it, according to a light that is that of consciousness, but also another, purer, closer light, emanating from the soul.

Her language is symbolic. What she expresses, she says in an indelible manner. She writes the words that need to be written, the words one expects. It is always a dreamlike exploration — an exploration of her feelings and sensations to their innermost reaches, an exploration of an inner world in which no caesura exists. Rather than being a projection of the “self” into the world, the works reveal an internalized world where images are akin to painting. She describes vivid, colorful scenes. She pushes back perspectives, separates planes, creates an immense circulation — and something like a pulse of eternity.

The vertiginous unfolding of images is the hallmark of an innovative and modern mind — the animating thought that circulates through the work and gives it its full dimension, revealing the stirrings of the inner state of being.

by

Nicole Malhamé Harfouche

Former Director of the School of Visual and Fine Arts

at Académie Libanaise des Beaux-arts