Barrage Fadi 

Beirut, 1940-1988

​

Fadi Barrage was born into a Sunni family in Beirut and was destined to succeed his father at the head of the family cereal-trading business. Somehow painting’s imperious call, its voice of ambition and vocation, developed in him. He was a student at Broumana High School until his Baccalaureate, where he acquired an intellectual Anglo-Saxon education.

​

The core values of this establishment and a British discipline – especially for boarders – were the best introduction to the intellectual training it dispensed: an English Protestantism adapted to the Middle East, diffusing its profound secularism, a fundamental honesty in regard to words and the world, and a pragmatism where the ardent desire for efficiency did not scorn a culture drawn from ancient tradition. The world was seen as an object to explore and transform. The sharpening of permanent self-analysis was facilitated by mastering a language where everything was said with an elusive economy, as a measure of its richness, and where interior life had only one limit – the obligation to not be a vague idealist. The education was inspired by empiricism and by this one fundamental consideration: idealism does not allow to analyse the objects of this world in sufficient depth. 

​

At school, Fadi Barrage was interested in ancient languages, natural sciences and French literature. But the French education system of the time neglected science to the benefit of Arts and Letters. He was passionate about the paraphernalia of the natural sciences’ section and its precise training in drawing, for the observation of nature and the old foundation of Darwinism which continued to raise contentious arguments. In this universe, drawing is considered a tool and its beauty even takes on this character: drawings or ornaments, anatomy, animals and plants. This descriptive aspect will remain asleep, as Barrage found something in ancient Greec that he would  one day seek in the art of painting, as a route to intellectual training. He naturally wished to pursue the study of this language, and for this reason, and perhaps also to distance himself from his background and lifestyle, he chose to study classical Greek at the University of Chicago. Behind this desire to study Greek in America, he had a desire to irremediably cut links with his past and with could be seen as integration. There lies the fascination of origins, a mostly mysterious and poetic notion. He wanted to read ancient Greek, as if to decipher the beginning of the world, but in another world.

​

For a long time, and particularly after he returned to Lebanon  in 1968 after four-year stay in Paris, Barrage would resort to Greek structural ang methodological references. Aristotle brought him a scientific method, an operational vision, a relationship with the world, and the painter was influenced by the philosopher’s metaphysics and aesthetics. Aristotelian realism sees, in a piece of art, the immanent form of the sensible thing. The artist is therefore an craftsman, with mastery of his profession, who works on reality and tries to reveal the inner form, for the form of the world is its substance. This fundamental truth is to be found in the desire to practise an art and to live it. This would lead to paintings that search, paintings of revelation and illumination of life and meaning, in which the aesthetical work would become ethical; and in which forms attached to reality would be experienced as emotion before the beauty of the world.

​

From then on, painting was no longer an intellectual question. It became the quest for “that something” behind the painting, that is actually the painting reduced to its essentials. But how to define “that something” in a clear manner, in less rhetorical terms than the search for childhood, the first images, the search for the origin, the path and place : the mystery where all is clear yet nothing seems accessible ? In this way, Leonardo de Vinci was a painter, as were Chardin, Le Nain and Paul Klee.

​

Aristotle may have infused the spirit of Barrage, but it was Klee, freely chosen, who handled his pictorial training. Picasso said to Klee, “You are the Pascal of painting.” Often reproduced, his work was little known in France in the 1960s, as were the Bauhaus and German painting between the wars. 

​

His theoretical writings were not published in their entirety until ten years later, when Barrage was too deeply engaged in his work to turn back. He had patiently united everything about this painter : books by Grohmann and Claude Roy, his journal translated by Klossowski and published by Grasset, postcard reproductions, some catalogues and photo albums – a different, but often very eloquent language.  

​

Klee gave him the sense of being a pictorial artisan, with an probity of means and craft, matter and color, construction of forms and, above all, this way of seeing that is not only a way of looking.

In this way, Klee represented all modern painting questioned and practised, from the Blaue Reiter to abstract Impressionism. He had disassembled the different languages of contemporary painting; his analysis and practical exercises were certainly painting for painters, but this was precisely his very strength, and this is the lesson Barrage kept before leaving, as one leaves all great masters : seeking the essential, one always reaches the goal. His painting is always linked to a long cultural and individual interrogation.

​

Intellectuals are often too easily categorised in a way where, erasing their own life their problems appear as already solved. In Lebanon, Barrage strongly criticised what he perceived as an environment too influenced by the negative rather than the positive aspects of French culture. However, he felt he could not detach himself from an important public fringe and from Franch-speaking Lebanese conoisseurs, who were far from representative of this caricature.

​

Barrage’s will to create involved anxiety, rejection, doubt, fear and fascination, but did not find a place or justification in a society like Lebanon’s, where everything works with the greatest ease. Its population was used to a complacent aesthetic in painting, where the practice of art seemed to represent a mere addition to life, something that is added not from the effect of a lack and need, but from artifice.

​

Paris upheld an important role for all the artists who addressed the problem of creation, a choice influenced by the symbolism of distance and exile, the detachment from a milieu and society in the name of a choice of the self. During these Parisian years, the poetic side of Barrage’s vision no longer seemed definitive, but appeared as just way of painting among others. From 1965, the School of Paris was losing speed facing American painting’s great push forward with abstract expressionism and Pop Art, but at least Paris continued to have the role of a living centre and a place where painting could be seen. 

​

At the death of his father in 1968, Barrage returned to Beirut. He gave his first two exhibitions in 1968 followed by a third one from 17th to 27th February 1971 at the exhibition hall of the Orient newspaper in Beirut. Two others were held, from 10th-22nd February 1972 in Dar el fan, and in 1974 at the Modulart Gallery. This same year, he moved to a new studio in Bab Edriss, which was looted and entirely destroyed at the beginning of the war in 1975. More than 1.500 canvases that had been left in a warehouse were also stolen. This move to Beirut was not caused by nostalgia – it could not be perceived as such at the time – but by simple convenience: an inexpensive studio and accommodation separate from the family home. 

​

The desire for independence and autonomy, the urge to live by his art and to enter the market economy also played a role in this decision.

​

This move was especially important because of the next phase it launched: a “reality” that was no longer the internal reality of poetic narcissism, but a survey of the city and a way of living with it, of opening one’s eyes to reality. This passage from abstract to figurative occurred for moral reasons but also, without doubt, for reasons linked to his daily life. He started considering the city itself in a poetic way, because he now saw and lived it differently, firstly because of the change of location, but also because of the assimilation of his experience into painting, which was not only linked to the act of leaving the family home. The characteristics of this city centre – a place of passage, meetings and trade – would not be those of a poetic location, if it was not a substratum of XIXth-century Beirut. It was an area inhabited by the poorest people in society: it had a few old and sometimes unhealthy houses, and living there meant he barely had the means to reside anywhere else. For those who where aware of what XIXth-century Beirut was like, these new townspeople sat somewhat awkwardly among the offices, depots, and business premises that surrounded them.

​

Without being political, Barrage was interested in politics; he came to it partly through social bias, since his return to the figurative – in the sense of taking over reality – involved reality in its entirety. How could one use people as models without listening to them? Even observing from afar is a way of listening. For Barrage, a collection of drawings by Rembrandt was the right key. The hatching, the chiaroscuro; at the right time, the technical tools for drawing were offered to him when he needed them. Figuring men out can be driven by the same passion and interest that makes one draw a skull or a seashell. But if he added something, and the nuance is important, it was the fact that from now he wanted to live amongst men and not seashells. It was less about an art that was engaged in life than a lifestyle choice.

​

The first time we encounter Barrage’s painting, we are struck by the novelty that it conveys: the desire not to run away from the world’s pictorial heritage. Perhaps being a painter suffices to explain this. From the beginning, this painting stands out from the traditional mental hubbub of Lebanese painting, putting away true reality and false pretense, the imitatation of landscapes and the magnanimity. In relation to the fifteen or so painters that preceded him in the 1960s, and who confronted the abstract in an almost total dichotomy, a painful and deliberate separation from themselves, Barrage appeared as someone whose language could have been abstraction.

​

His work defines something essential in the historic course of Lebanese painting: for the first time, a work is created by questioning the history of painting and considering pictorial culture as the starting point of any painting. Culturally, Lebanese painting often went like this: the artist went to live in Paris for a few years to see what was going on, and then returned to Beirut and all his problems would be solved. Then the painter would elaborate his painting for passersby or for ambient mediocrity. The initial requirement languished or was exasperated by the effect of this unconscious rift.

​

Barrage did not have this problem, but at least he had to recross his four years in Paris to succeed at a new return to Beirut. The danger from which he escaped was that everything could have been solved in a literary way, in a pictorial poetry, and in the pursuit of an impossible object, an object that was vague and distant by definition, whose continual evasion became the only means of existence and the reason to search.

​

The difficulty of analysing this work is not the scattering or absence of a “catalogue raisonné”, but the screen of a perpetual pictorial reading set between intentions and realisation, which the work of art does not clarify or justify by making it part of cultural history – or else, of a history imposed not by something arbitrary, but by something that ensnares the work and the ambition in their own desire. 

​

For Barrage, artifice was the first necessary step to create the artwork from the inside. Hence his torturing of the form in any possible way, even “torturing” Klee, and as a counterpoint, destruction as a means of surpassing artifice, not necessarily towards something more humane, but by a more complex appropriation. The destruction triggered a contradictory relationship that catalysed the desire to work on the elaboration and creation of the art itself. Therefore, Barrage’s principal discovery in respect to the psychology of the Lebanese artist, was to introduce this notion of destruction as a fundamental element in the personality of the artist.

​

Barrage clearly asked questions about the contradictions and clashes of local cultures, thanks to the different and original light that he brought from his original community, his Protestant education and his studies of Greek Classics in the USA. Add Paris and its difficulties – an extreme seclusion by exile – and the poetic self-knowledge that the city brings. In his case, sharing common factors with traditional Christian communities always felt out of sync. His culture was European, of course, but Anglophone not Francophone, and English, not American, even if he sojourned in Chicago : he was marked by his own attachment to the past, taking the poetic color of ancient Greece as a place to project and realise the self.

​

His painting is more complex: its influences are multiple, contradictory and from different periods. Everyone is confronted to the culture that one has created for oneself, and to the baggage that, in its matter, is one’s reference and working model. In this framework, Barrage was one of the rare painters to ask painting intellectual questions. This was undoubtedly also the result of his literary education, approach of reality and sensitivity. He was haunted by the idea that the way he lived was very far from life, but he wanted to assume it and live it. He took the apogee of artifice for the truth of painting and life. Victor Hakim made an ironic version of this drama: a wheat merchant’s son who began painting the history of bankruptcy.

​

One can ask about Barrage “how far can go the son of a wealthy Sunni family formed by Greece?” He would have liked to write, and was tempted by a literary career. For the Lebanese at that time, writing in a language of possible opening was the only way to express their identity and prevent their sensitivity from being crushed. But when he understood that painting allowed him to think about his life in a close and intimate way, writing became a simple tool once again. 

​

Why did the enterprise come to a dead end? The answer is a paradox: undoubtedly because of the extreme refinement of his methods and of his approach to a crude reality that accumulated, in its complexity, strata, people, ways of thinking, blendings and variations, so that taking them into account became increasingly difficult. What could drawing do, if not isolate the detail, dissect it, and push this dissection to its very end? But it was unable to make a visible and comprehensible synthesis of this addition of details. Hence these white canvases covered with fine nuances of sienna, these forms blurred as soon as they started to mean something precise. This painting was less about the pleasure of painting than of floating in a psychologically indecisive space. As in 1968, the period of the large “nervous” watercolors, whose freedom helped him forget the falsely uncontrolled drawing of Paul Klee and the mastery that locked itself in its own control so that it could not go any further, always stayed below his abilities, because it depended on the search for an effect and  a need to reproduce his work. There are no longer any canvases left from this period. They were never exhibited and were all stolen in 1976, during the war.

​

After 1971, even the more figurative themes of everyday life, came back to the symbolic and closed forms of previous years, as an ending analysis. The more reality entered into possession of the painting exercise, the more the construction of the canvas became an elaboration of its forms. The sketches and drawings became freer, with a more interior liberty and confidence of the hand, freed from the fear of letting his hand go without finding anything recognisable, other than the mirror of his own hesitations. On the contrary, Barrage searched for the dialogue between the forms perceived by the eye. These ancient symbolic forms, which were perceived as necessary structures for the construction of a painting, finally dissolved into a reality that was neither tyrannical nor unilateral but dictated by his own forms.

​

This evolution – and here is an important point – was not a passage from abstract to real forms. The passage was a technical problem, but there was also the problem of the pictorial work’s conduct, which did not come from a too easy vision of a reality that became heavier and heavier, and from the way of setting it on the canvas ; but  unveiled further tension and concern for the search. We need to distinguish, in the problem of form, what is pictorial and what is linked to the forms of reality : the difference is the passage between one form to the other, the possibility of structuring the reality of visual perception and of structuring the canvas, not from a psychological perspective, but from the point of view of technique – the canvas as an object.

​

After June 1975, the destruction of the studio and exile muddled the perspectives. The destruction of this physical and ideal space was a source of such profound distress for Barrage that he could not express it in any other way than through deconstructed form. After 1975, his painting staged self-destruction linked to the demolition of Lebanon, not as a political entity but as a place and way of life – and also as the  foundations of his long and difficult return to reality, leaving behind mythology and the creation of signs. It was Barrage himself that had been irredeemably destroyed.

​

He needed to ensure his own existence in exile. How to recreate a place without magic, without a lived past, and especially without freedom and the possibility of choosing them for yourself? Barrage was too far gone to return to a culture that would overcome every deficiency felt as fundamental to him, like part of his intimate self. The everyday life had become uncomfortable and did not allow a natural exchange in drawing and painting. He needed to express this everyday life as quickly as possible – and firstly in a literal sense, with recognisable signs, so others could recognise it before himself, otherwise all would be lost in the communication. This was too primary and frustrating an elaboration for a sustained experience of the reality exile, suspended between a lack of confidence and uncertainty about the moment when one needs to leave a tracked drawing.

​

Taking this step led to regressions, but sometimes also to canvases of great strength, an attempt to put things back in their place. It also led to the discovery – where one would hope for a positive aspect in the fact that “you always carry your problems with you” – that from this moment, and in a tangible and symbolic way, reality became such an intimate part of the work and its pictorial elaboration, and in such a natural dialogue, that the painter felt amputated. 

​

Financial difficulties aside - which weighed heavily upon him - it was useless to think about settling in Paris, for the experience of this city could not be lived in an innocent way. Realising that he needed to continue painting other “realities” took him some time, since it took fifteen years for Barrage to begin to hear reality in Beirut.

​

It was financial and health issues that, after Egypt and Turkey, drove him to Athens, Cyprus, and finally brought him back to Beirut, where he died in 1988.

​

Barrage represents the failure not of an approach to painting or life, but of the attempt to disentangle the complexity of the intellectual skein that made many worlds coexist within him, many ways of life and cultures, which Gordian Knot he hoped to cut through innocence, naivety, stubborn ambition or technical ability. But perhaps he became entangled by not being sufficiently in contact with the traditional academic school or with L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, to be able to react permanently against the academy.

​

Did Barrage leave behind unfinished painting? The question is not of great interest. It is better to speak of a painter who, in the eight years between 1968 and 1976, laid the foundation for a development heralding the possibility of Lebanese painting, whose reality was that of this country, perceived beyond figurative folklore – a painting that joined the question of a Lebanese pictorial identity, and revealed the complexity of his composition and synthesis, and certain fragility, until everything stopped in one blow. But this time, unlike what usually happens, it was reality that abandoned the painter.

​

Barrage was a student of Paul Klee’s chemistry, along with Haidi Chichini, Georges Doche and Edouard Niermans. 

​

Klee’s chemistry was poetic but also a laboratory of colors and matters. It was the mental universe of Sennelier and Ali Baba’s cave of colors. 

​

As he was fragile, serious and guilty, he considered it necessary to pay for all of this at the same time. Also, transformed this happy freedom into drama, and devoted himself to becoming the most unfortunate painter of all. 

​

The devotion to unhappiness is a full-time job. Those who do it do not know how to do otherwise and, by not knowing, head towards complete disaster, being so afraid of it that it becomes a blind and guaranteed target. He had to create a work of art without belief, with the gap of time or of form that would only be justified and unified by this will to create a work of art. 

​

Barrage settled in the Raouché area of Beirut, in a one-bedroom apartment rented by his brother in 1976, at the time when Bab Edriss was evacuated. He drew in a morphology of fantasy, divided between boards of anatomy, mixing anatomy and natural sciences, and the setting of these very fantasies, believing that he had discovered “the real people” of this old city. 

​

Living in the Musée area, he did not even know this part of Beirut. The early 1960s were the era of a well-known café on Cannons Square, l’As de Pique, whose décor was painted by Guiragossian. 

Such venues embodied the way in which individuals were always someone else, and the destructive role of the social game in this society, to become someone else. 

​

It was also in the very definition of this other world. He did not know what he wanted to have access to, and did not manage to define the means to gain such access.

​

The imaginary world that Barrage hailed from was the English hinterland – a projection of a misplaced and decadent romanticism that harshly struggled to adapt. It was an English province made for country life, a projection between the TLS, and the idea of being an artist in Paris and Beirut. 

​

Barrage was sometimes able to experience painting as an astute questioning, because it was provoked. But he put such good will into it that the question that was asked went no further than a delayed answer. 

​

It was simply the time needed to digest the influences and to pass to a real world, one for which it was necessary to give time to fall in order to hope for redemption.