DÉDÉ HOURANI

Contemporary Artist-Painter and Author

HONORARY DISTINCTIONS
- The two White House medals presented by President Ronald Reagan
- Houston Museum Award presented by Mr. Kenneth Jenesson
- Medal from the American Space Center NASA presented by Mr. Arthur Dula
- Title of “Honorary Houstonian & Goodwill Ambassador” presented by Mayor Louie Welch
- Houston Committee Center Award
- Houston Center Art Committee Award presented by Mrs. Kona Richardson, CEO of the Southwest Art Museum
- Key to the City of Houston, presented by Mayor Jim McConn and Councilman Louis Macey
- Key to the City of Washington, D.C. presented by President George Bush
- White House Medal (Blue Room) presented by President George Bush
- High Distinction from Atlantic Richfield Company (sponsor of Dédé Hourani) presented by Mr. Dean Baxter
- Seal of the President of the United States presented by President George Bush
- White House Medal pin presented by President George Bush
- Pentagon “Vivat Republica” Medallion presented by Mr. Ed Rahal
- White House Medal presented by Mr. Ed Rahal, former Chief Corporate Affairs Officer of the Republican Senate Committee
- United States Capitol Hill Medal presented by Senator M. Orrin Hatch
- Republican Party Award
- Honorary Citizen (Empire of Texas) awarded by President George W. Bush
- Second White House Medal (Blue Room) presented by President George W. Bush

Dédé Hourani, Founder and President of the Selecteum of Arts and Sciences, also established her own quartet, the “Musique del Tempo Quartet” — a first in Lebanon and the Middle East — as well as an orchestra with a choir. She organized musical and cultural sessions and soirées both in Lebanon and abroad.
An internationally renowned visual artist and writer, she holds a diploma from the Music School and the Interior Architecture School of ALBA. She also obtained a Master’s degree in Visual and Fine Arts, ranked first in her class, with highest honors and the congratulations of the jury, chaired by Alexis Boutros, founder and President of ALBA.
Given the excellence of the project — both in terms of concept, mastery of execution media, and pictorial achievement — and in order to highlight the high standards of ALBA, she received the congratulations of the jury chaired by Alexis Boutros, cellist and first conductor in Lebanon, who decided to exhibit her work at Dar El Fann wal Adab, the first Lebanese House for Art and Culture, founded in 1969. It should also be noted that Dédé was one of the outstanding piano students of pianist and pedagogue Igor Shchetinnikov (often spelled Igor Cheskinov), a graduate of the prestigious Tchaikovsky State Conservatory in Moscow. She was also one of the top students of Zaven, sculpture professor at ALBA.
Dédé Hourani’s career has followed a distinguished path. Alongside the private exhibitions of her works that she has organized, and the numerous International Biennials in which she has participated, she has held senior professional positions throughout her career, including:
- Professor at the School of Visual and Fine Arts at ALBA.
- Reviewer of practical projects, from first to fifth year.
- Patron of diploma projects, at both Bachelor’s and Master’s levels.
- Member of the Committee of the School of Visual and Fine Arts, responsible for implementing artistic and cultural exchanges with the National Higher Schools of Arts in France — such as ENSBA, ENSAD, Arles, Cergy-Pontoise, ENSAAMA, and Duperré — from 1986 to 2016, during the period when Nicole Malhamé Harfouche served as Director of the School.
- Member of the Lebanese Association of Visual Artists.
- Member of the ALBA Alumni Association.
- Appointed Honorary Member of the ALBA Alumni Committee.
- Honorary Member of the Houston Contemporary Museum.
- Honorary Member of the Houston Opera House.
- Goodwill Ambassador of the City of Houston.
- Since 1997, she has been a member of the Pen Club.
- She is a member of the Saliba Douaihy Committee in New York, serving as Representative for the external affairs of Saliba Douaihy Art in Europe.
- Member of the Zaki Nassif Program Committee at the American University of Beirut.

Generous at heart, she has financially supported many underprivileged families and continues to work for the promotion of Arts and Culture.

From 1986 to 2016, during the period when Nicole Malhamé Harfouche served as Director of the School of Visual and Fine Arts at ALBA, she granted support scholarships to financially struggling students. Each year, she awarded four prizes, including one to the top student of the Bachelor’s cycle, and one to the valedictorian of the Master’s cycle, along with a scholarship to pursue studies in French universities. She also assisted many students with enrollment and funding for their doctoral theses, whether at universities in Lebanon or abroad.

From 2016 onward, she continues to support deserving students through tuition aid scholarships and awards for those enrolled in the School of Architecture and the School of Interior Architecture.

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