At the Gallery Surface Libre d’Art: Joseph Matar … a foretaste of paradise with this magician of light

Joseph Matar has always fascinated us with his poetic and mystical work.

His great technical mastery allows him to translate into beauty his purest visions. This exceptional artist presents a visual art that offers something other than mere decoration. Rejecting “art” that has become superficial “business”, he upholds the original role of the artist as messenger between worlds, men and ideas, between the spiritual and the material. For those who know how to decipher his symbolism, his paintings are true books of life. When first discovering his canvases, one is struck by the light which suffuses the pictorial surface of each work and by the power which masters the colours so as to organise his landscapes or to seize groups of people like musical symphonies. The underlying talent strives to evoke a Mediterranean land which is translated two-dimensionally without any betrayal.

PASSION FOR SPIRITUALITY

In point of fact, it is some time since we last had an opportunity to see his compositions. So now his new exhibition being held at the Surface Libre d’Art gallery is an event worthy of note. Here is an artist who has a passion for the spirituality of the Universe and who translates this concern through landscapes stumbled upon on the mountainside or again through his characters set against a communicable sensitivity. His work all in colours takes us into a world full of quasi-musical echoes, revealing life and nature in their most harmonious aspects. In the greater number of his paintings there is an æsthetic quest giving access to a world like that which must have existed at the first dawn of creation. Everything evokes the joy of life, of the earth, of the idyllic vision of the villages. Chasing the invisible out from behind the visible, like some hunter of souls, Joseph Matar is certainly not one of those who let themselves be satisfied with artistic compromise. For him it is a question of being the messenger bearing news of the transfiguration of Man.
Beyond the simple appearance of his subjects, he paints an interior vision of his model, representing humanity radiating the Divine Incarnation. And what can one say of this illumination that sets his surfaces alight?

Painter of light, he has known how preserve this youthfulness of spirit that has maintained this elevation of the soul of which St.-Exupéry speaks, like a free bird which flies above the perpetuity of things. His nervous tints, manifold, grained and prismatic, stretch layer upon layer under the imprint of his brush, melting together at the passing whim, with the shades and interplay of two or three basic colours, subtly moderated into gentle tonalities.

A WORK FOR THE SERVICE OF BEAUTY

Sometimes ultramarine, the blues shine azure with the depth of the sky, meeting yellows that take on the brilliance of flowers of broom and flow down to dark browns and gilded ochres. But his prime colour is always light. Free of mental dictation, he seizes the heart of what can be felt, there where the saving transmutations of the soul take place. There are certain beings who keep to their road their whole life long, without ever deviating from their goal, their line of conduct or their philosophy even for an instant. They go always further ahead in their personal exploration and discover the finest values in their domain, along a path with no outer glory. Joseph Matar is one of those; all his painting is a commentary knowing no end, an illustration for ever renewed, a bringing to light of his questionings.

His new exhibition allows one to see that his work is totally expressed in a parabola of symbolic language. The gallery Surface Libre d’Art offers up till 6th January an opportunity to meet an artist whose execution is worthy of his inspiration and is given over entirely to beauty.