Written by RAMI KARIM

Amine El Bacha was born into a family of painters and musicians in the Ras Al Nabaa neighborhood of Beirut in 1932. After graduating from the St. Sauveur School, he studied under César Gemayel, Jean-Paul Khoury, and Fernando Manetti at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, from 1954 to 1957. Through a scholarship from the French Embassy, he then studied in Paris under Maurice Brianchon and Henri Goetz at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and Académie de la Grande Chaumière, respectively, from 1960-1968. 

Before dedicating his life to art, El Bacha worked briefly as a decorator’s assistant and at Radio Liban. As a child, he would frequent the studio of Hungarian painter Stefan Lokos in Beirut, and the two would depict the city from the vantage points of its rooftops, gardens, and cafés. It was through these exercises that El Bacha learned to paint color through memory. His engagement with color expanded in Paris through experiments with abstraction. El Bacha sought to depict the essences of his objects, challenging modernism to involve intuited aesthetic associations. 

El Bacha sharpened this technique while in Paris, creating semiotic representations of nature that considered musical sensibility, light, temperature, and climate in addition to his own vision. It was then that El Bacha’s engagement with modernism intersected with his return to childhood memory and perception, cementing it as a guiding principle of his practice. His consequent style emerged from Cubism and Oriental art, genres that flattened their subjects to convey their most essential nature. El Bacha was invited to spend five years at Educavi Maesta Foundation in Italy in 1976. In 1979, he won an international competition to design the mosaic of the San Martino church in Legnano, which exposed him to Byzantine and Islamic art by way of their presence in the European Mediterranean. His work then began to include pictorial and ornamental features, even in depictions of nature.

Throughout prolonged stays in France, Italy, and Spain, El Bacha remained anchored to his aesthetic roots in Lebanon. His color palette was birthed in his homeland and traveled alongside him. Beirut specifically evoked for El Bacha the autonomous and once Arab region of Andalusia in southern Spain, which led him to move there in 1987. El Bacha spent this period creating about a hundred watercolor paintings that were compiled into an art book about Andalusian civilization. 

Music played an active role in El Bacha’s practice. He was once quoted saying, “One can hear music while looking at my artwork.” Growing up, his brother Toufic was an established musician and composer, and his uncle a composer and painter who gifted him a watercolor set as a child. From a very young age, they would paint landscapes together, which marks the beginning of his practice. El Bacha’s intimate relationship to music was crucial in developing his signature expressionist style that transcended modernism’s insistence on structural givens such as foreground. Unlike other mediums, music allows for the creation of meaning and beauty out of sheer abstraction while still employing formal parameters. Music allowed El Bacha to manipulate color and shape the same way a poet does language, balancing conventional legibility with experimental abstraction and renewing visual associations of even the most familiar objects. More than romance, music for El Bacha served as a tool for freeing the visual senses. He emulated melody, grounding each piece and encouraging complex compositional structures, much like those appearing in song. He also merged the technical registers of each medium to create rhythms of color, as is exemplified by a mix of abstract and defined moves in his work.

El Bacha was a master colorist who consistently managed a synergistic ensemble of light-stricken hues. His subjects included rural landscapes, nature portraits, cityscapes, and their interior dwellings, humans, and figureless abstract designs. A noteworthy example of El Bacha’s nature work can be found in Paysage (Qartaba, région de Byblos)(1988), where he melds features of a textured landscape into a flattened, nearly two-dimensional depiction. Also observable in Paysage is El Bacha’s masterful handling of white space, which he used to outline a tree. El Bacha’s intellect shines in Le Dîner intime (2004), which portrays a dinner table occupied by two women, a man, and two other nonhuman figures: one with the head of a bird, another with a clock instead of a head. The two women are seated together, looking uncomfortably at one another, and the man is at the head of the table, also visibly uncomfortable. With its mouth open, the bird appears to talk to an unsettled cohort of diners as the clock ticks. 

An ardent watcher of people and places, El Bacha’s practice could be described as anthropological due to the observational work that went into each piece. He would sit for hours in cafés, streets, theatres, public squares, landmarks, and nature reserves, watching the world go by through his unique lens. He would then transcribe what he saw, adjusting content to account for his own desires. This collision of documentary and imaginative gesture quickly became his trademark. Dreamlike depictions of otherwise quotidian features characterize El Bacha’s relationship to abstraction that draws from memory and childhood visual associations. 

El Bacha worked primarily in watercolor, though he took on ceramics, tapestry, jewelry, India ink, oil paint, and wood throughout his career. He also believed that writing was integral to creating visual work, and in addition to keeping regular journals, published the play The Suicide in 2009. His entire oeuvre was crafted at the nexus of his intellectual and aesthetic registers. The through line between each piece was unmistakable emotionality, which benefited paintings of humans and nature alike. In fact, El Bacha claimed to witness the same forms repeat themselves among varied subjects: "the curve of the head is the earth, the sun, and the moon. The horizontal is the sea, and the vertical is the tree. Everything repeats itself in a different form.” 

El Bacha passed away in Beirut on February 5, 2019, at the age of 87. 

Sources

Fayçal Sultan. Homage to Amine El Bacha: Partitions and Colors. Beirut: Sursock Museum, 2017.

Abillama, Nour Salamé, Marie Tomb, Amin Maalouf, Joseph Tarrab, Cesar Nammour, Maha Azizé Sultan, Fayçal Sultan, and Gregory Buchakjian. Art from Lebanon: modern and contemporary artists, 216-227. Beirut, Lebanon: Wonderful editions, 2012. 

Nammour, Cesar, and Gabriela Schaub. Resonances, 82 Lebanese artists reviewed by Helen Khal, 14-17. Beirut: Fine Arts Publishing, 2011.
Matar, William. One Fine Art | Artists - Painters / Daoud Corm. Accessed March 04, 2019. https://www.onefineart.com/artists/painters/Amine-el-Bacha.

Amine El Bacha - Biography. Accessed March 04, 2019. http://www.aminelbacha.com/01-biography/Biog01.html.

"Lebanon Bids Farewell to Artist Amine El-Bacha." The Daily Star Newspaper - Lebanon. Accessed March 04, 2019. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Arts-and-Ent/Culture/2019/Feb-07/476065-lebanon-bids-farewell-to-artist-amine-el-bacha.ashx.