About Joseph Matar:

Here is a name to always bear in mind, the name Joseph Matar. Here also is a lifetime of achievement, a masterpiece in itself.

Artist Joseph Matar is a great humanist, born of the piercing sun and glowing luminosity of the Orient. He is a poet and creative spirit, matured in the universities, workshops and museums of Europe, of Spain, of France and of Italy. His is the eastern soul out to conquer the genius of the West, a human flame with mystic roots in the divine.

Creative artist, theorist and technician, free of all burden of system, he seeks to express himself in light! To him blind chance and obscurity are repugnant. On every canvas, the interplay of line, colour and volume falls into place of hard struggle, like the victory of a strategist or like some great symphony! Here is “a nest of verdure where a house rings out a melody” and there is a whole village rapt in contemplation of the sea. Beyond stands a vigorous tree that offers the bounty of its fruit. In yet another place one sees an immense sun beating down on the plain, a family around a newborn babe, or the golden glory of an ascending crowd.

Joseph Matar is a master of many artistic fields and pictorial techniques portraiture, anatomy, landscape and history, and above all sacred art brought to life with a new inspiration. He is master of many media, oils, water-color, pastels, ink and pencil…

When he welcomes you at Eddé-Byblos, you feel yourself in the studio of some great figure of the Renaissance, abounding in creative energy. An experience awaits you that will leave its imprint in the depths of your psyche.

LebanonArt – Editorial

Artist Statement:

I was only ten years old when the magic world of colour was first revealed to me. It came in the year 1945 with assorted Indian inks of different ranges; it was my first experience, the experience of handling this medium with its magical effects, and so my life went on…

Thanks to University, my travels, my studies, the exhibitions, the press and my friends, every day and almost every instant brought a new experience. In my profession as an artist, painting as an art and as a medium of creation knows no end. But then another element came to add itself to colour, and my life found a new focus, in the blaze of light!

Colour, light, space, time, the whole cosmos and all existence, these come together as the ultimate experience which inflames me every day in my works. I speak of days, for the nights no longer exist for me. Light fills my soul with multicoloured dreams on the road to the portals of paradise itself. It leads me to the Creator of all things, the Creator who has allowed his creatures to become in turn creators.

I speak of creation in the domain of the Fine Arts, and here I speak of painting in particular.

Every work is a poem, for art is poetry “par excellence”. At every dawn I must watch the sunrise and let light flood my soul as it bathes the universe.

I am a messenger of love and of light, being one of the many children of the sun.

May the sun live long in us and show itself by the light it sends; such is my daily prayer.

Joseph MATAR – 2001

Essay Creative Writing by Joseph Matar