When facing the great mysteries, I feel that I am forever a learner. To know is an act of the intelligence. It is also a need, knowledge being open to everyone. To know is neutral; by knowledge, one can dominate. To know is to become another, while yet remaining oneself. One has to know the physical world by science and research.

One has to know God by contemplation directed by love, truth and respect.

Our civilization should take up its responsibilities in the face of the future. Man is like clay in the hands of the potter, to be molded and evolving with the world., therefore transformable. To “remake” man without God is to suppress him. God is born in the thought of man. But lights come, lights emanating from the soul.

Man the universal artist…

Globalize art before all globalization. The Creator has left his imprint in this admirable world, his masterpiece… nothing is of no use… one has only to remove one single element and the whole structure will collapse… In the work of God the Creator… as well as in the work of art,, it is the final effect which counts. Nothing can be removed or added without the whole composition losing its balance.

The first work of art is the universe made in the image of its Creator, the perfect Composer.

The artist, like the Creator, is present in his work; the impetus of his genius inflames us, disturbs us and renders us speechless with admiration. The scenes which occur on earth have already happened in the cosmos, the domain of the divine… This God who is able, who wills, who knows how to make his work as like him as possible… this work where some parts are visible… and others invisible…

The artist’s career us the most difficult one, if one may suppose that it is a career.

Art as creation and poetry, true art, is the fruit of a sincere and living communion of the artist with his environment, that is to say the physical universe, men, nature, all existence… and the spiritual universe in its broadest meaning… which reveals itself in imaginings, conceptions, grandiose compositions, which cause the artist and the visionary to be overwhelmed by emotion …

The form will come to life after being constructed by the artist, passing from a synthesis to a creation, all of which supposes several visual and mental operation of imagination, sensation and abstraction, for the spirit to penetrate the form, mold the matter and make another form, ethereal, spiritual, communicative, with the force of inspiration and the heart of a poet, for the image to be transmitted to the soul.

Joseph Matar has the sun shining in his soul… his work is a hymn to the sun and to light. Reality becomes spirit, the luminosity of the soul, to love and to know the very matter of his work, the workman, the craftsman, the artist.

To pursue a dialogue with light and to become drunk with it… that is my situation… I am drugged with art, with painting.. creation, drawing from the deepest depths within me new and unknown worlds… I have never painted with lucre in mind…

I paint because in my genetic make-up there is this fire, this flame that one calls ‘inspiration’ or ‘genius’, ‘poetry’ and so on… it is my way of life, with passion from love of my work, my dynamic way of acting, revolutionary, bubbling over… I paint as I write, as I breathe, as I dream…

As I converse with God and the Virgin and the angels, so I feel the need to love.

During my earthly passage… a cosmic one… I do what God has done, before and after the creation… Man aided by heaven… The ideas which liberate and the ideas which devour… The epic work in which I am engaged now, with the love of the artist for his work… of the creator for his creation… of the father for his son…

Love is born in the heart of a man.

Man is entirely mingled, engaged, in nature, in all its elements buzzing with activities; it regenerates itself, remakes and recreates itself… filling with life the totality of nature.

Man is conscience of nature; by treating it badly he destroys his own self.

He who does nothing is lazy, nonchalant, and wears himself out doing nothing; he who labors, actively works, regenerates himself and fills himself with life. Time must never be wasted; young or old, one should always be of service, never tending to a useless old age… He who gives must always give.

Drugged, yes, and how?

Drugged by art, by painting, which circulates in the artist’s veins like the air in his lungs.

I may well say that it is the means of expression for the contents of a rich soul, a gold mine that has never been thoroughly explored. It is a source of gifts which renews itself without interruption, something which cannot be helped except by increasing the poetic and intoxicating dose.

The artist paints as he breathes, as he lives, anything artificial having no place in his existence.

His passion is the work coming to light, taking shape, being born in his hands and existing independently of its creator. This dynamic passion is reflected in his life, in his work, in his genes where blow the very individual storms of his genius. Painting, like drinking, writing, breathing, living… I will not say sleeping, for rest is something the artist does not know.

For a masterpiece to be born… how much training come first, how much genius, how much fatigue, how much courage and enthusiasm and love, and much else…

The real battlefield is within ourselves, in our own souls; it is there that genius lives out its drama, the one which is in us all…

The spirit of the creator, whether poet or painter or whatever else, is transformed into the spirit of the gods… children of luminous spheres, bearers of light… Mary, our dawn… Mary, Queen of Lebanon…

Every brushstroke tells his story as it was lived, grasped and felt… in its dimensions, it is a personal experience which opens the doors of his soul, this universe in whose inner sky there shine thousands of stars. Joseph Matar knows how to give new forms to that which is particular to each of us. A work is like life, it supposes a unity of conception in new experiences… to attain a new vision of the world.

Everything is expressed and experienced here, from a personal angle, in a particular manner, through which one breathes the air of freedom…

– Every individual would like to come out with a ‘first’, a book, a show, or whatever… believing himself an artist, a creator?
– To grasp and to harmonize the relations in a work. The ‘understanding’ man is he who acts, with forms, colors and lines… that are woven and mingled in the soul of the artist.
– The wise and understanding self that produces is the self in action… the origin of the works is to be found in the depths of the soul.
– The contents of the world, of existence, of the world of elements… the cohesions, the bond, he expresses them with passion and poetry.
– He throws himself with his whole being, with those selfs of his, his love, his force, his spiritual and physical life…

Joseph Matar spiritualizes his perception, universalizing his individualism in order to act. It should be understood: by understanding one transforms the world, transforming oneself to start with.

Man is at the origin of every evaluation: his value is absolute, the most elevated. Only he who understands what liberty is can comprehend and esteem this value.

To universalize his own self, his whole being… spiritual sun, new creations.

Beauty is participation, like the self, which it also is participation.

Beauty is difficult to attain… what is beautiful is difficult to produce…the beauty of forms, the beauty of life… to attain beauty through art… the need is pressing, and the producers of canvases and images who have no formation and have an empty soul are to be found in abundance today. Joseph Matar lifts us up toward the Light: the midday sun shines at the dawn of his work, his testament. His colors in addition to the form, planes and strokes have their sonority, their music. It is the fusion of the body and the soul, of matter and spirit, impregnated by the divine breath which breathes in every work.

The mature work of God is neutral as well as beautiful… seen through man, it takes its dimensions and forms and changes itself into ideas, colors and a masterpiece. On the cultural level, to evolve means a continuous revolt… like the eternal and lasting laws that govern the cosmos – evolution certainly, but not negation. By negation it is impossible to create. Life, that divine activity, a stroke, a line, a color, all these are charged with what is sacred and divine…

As a poet, he contemplates the beautiful, meditates on it, feels it, and his anticipating soul is filled with love for the beautiful and each stroke takes part and expresses the emotion in his soul.

Anguish has no place in his work, rather the vibration of inner life.

The soul of the painter, associating itself with the universal soul, molds by love.

He even paints what is not yet thought… his will to create is animated by love; the dynamism of this tireless, bubbling over, audacious, hold us.

His painting is prayer… each stroke, each color, is a hymn of the Angelus.

He is citizen of a universe that knows no frontiers, transparent and pure… the universe of light.

He is citizen of this living cosmos, a living cosmos of love and of passion. Transparent fire of light, his colors are where his soul plunges deep and where he is dissolved. He and his figures are bathed in a mystic, transparent atmosphere where there reigns a most particular light., being terrestrial rivers where we are incarnated, drawing us to the cosmos which is his passion. He causes the forces of the world to make gold on earth from the light of the sun. He takes humdrum reality to express every intimity with his rich and faithful strokes of the brush. With him, one feels the invisible…

– spiritual signification in his expression.
– The dwelling-place of humanity that over time is built little by little and that is peopled by works of Art.
– Art, true art, far from being a mere curiosity, a skill, a technique, is the expression of a superior individuality…
– The kingdom of heaven must commence within us…
– The creators of visual and spiritual myths give intensity to our lives, impressing us.
– The emotions exalt us.
– His works have life-giving power.
– He is a magician of light, writing of light, communicating the spark of life…

His work, saturated with light, explodes into colors, a dazzling manifestation of light, bursting with warmth, an absolutely personal vision, a faculty of perception… a will to express, a skill in execution.

His creative delineation is full of virtuosity. He is present in his work lik the divine iin its creation… In addition to talent, gifts, will to create, inspiration and surrounding mystery, he has something of that divine genius which makes him more poet, with colossal imagination…

He is the friend of all light, related between the masterpiece and its creator, the chaos of origins… works of his unique personality.

Joseph Matar
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Translated from French: K.J.Mortimer