Le soir Revue du Liban

Of all the painting artists of the new generation, I know none with a more authentic and ardent vocation than Joseph Mattar.

In the Lebanese climate of the last quarter-century with its revolutionary painting authorizing and consecrating every kind of facile approach and absurdity, this young painter remains convinced that he cannot reach fulfillment and execute works of lasting value except by relentlessly studying the classic techniques. So he passes his days delineating the faces and the landscapes which surround him.

He has made rapid progress in his art. The classical discipline which he willingly imposed on himself today gives his works a firm foundation and solid structure, ensuring that they will endure despite all the changing fashions in the plastic arts. Today Mattar bends the techniques he has acquired to his romantic and visionary temperament, presenting us with sweeping canvases, frescoes one might almost say, where Lebanese history and the visions and ardent fires which animate the artist take on form and colour and offer themselves to us with great suggestive power.

Joseph Mattar remains in all his plastic art firmly attached to “classical” humanism, which however does not mean that he confines himself to the “academic” despite the urging of the fashions promoted since the beginning of this century by dehumanized Schools of Art.

The Priest dominates in this salon. This is a severe and austere subject to which Mattar has been able to give life and to which his own lyric character has often been able to give a charm that compensates the absence of color in the habit of the monk.

One can only esteem and praise Joseph Mattar for his concern in placing real human beings solidly on his canvases and for making them live and move in their special atmosphere, physical as well as moral.

We do not have the least doubt that he is destined to become the authentic voice of our Lebanese human spirit.

George D. Corm