Fakih Chafic 

Aley (Lebanon), 1928

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Chafic Fakih studied philosophy at the American University of Beirut from 1948 to 1949, and received a degree in Arab Literature from the Arab University of Beirut in 1967.

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More than in Rayess’ first works, one can see in Chafic Fakih’s first exhibition the depiction of an imaginary world, created incrementally through the drawing. The plasticity of form that Rayess experienced as a natural expression of his internal fantasies was an extreme form of his spiritual richness, as his correspondence with Mikhail Nouaymé shows it.

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He needed to translate these internal forms by other means; he did not have any other possible language for this seismograph of his soul. Fakih followed the same path, but was immediately considered by Pierre Robin – the director of the Ecole des Lettres in Beirut in the late 1940s – as representing an overture for the Druzes to embrace modernity, which was a way of reading modernity and not of reading the Druzes. Fakih saw it as an additional legitimisation. The fundamental aspect was Druze, and came from clanic solidarity. The interest that Robin and Lebanese intellectual circles showed in him – a restrained interest, for everyone was not favorable towards this irruption in the artistic domain – could not only be based on the preface of a catalogue and an article in a journal.

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Fakih confronted the difficulty of articulating his practice with a culture, a continuity, and a history, far more than with the recognition of others. The sculptural complexity of this internal world challenged reality and competed with the real world. At times, he would have loved to continue his drawings by writing, and vice versa. He sometimes felt that he was not sufficiently close to what he carried within himself, and the drama had less to do with this than with the realisation that he did not manage to carry further. His problem was not linked to the expression or to the mastery of technique, but to the naivety of painting while putting painting aside like a tired habit. Yet what he believed he had to say was always overrated, trapped by painting when it was not taken into account. 

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This feeling came from the literal approach of the majority of Lebanese painting, which was due as much to a lack of awareness of tradition – and therefore of a historical and cultural continuity – as to the continuity of the traditional transmission of the art of painting. 

In 1950, when Onsi was painting Druze women at the fountain, Fakih was trying to make something more than watercolors, even if his understanding of watercolors was far more relaxing. He was not trying to respond to the Druze pictorial tradition, but was searching for the Druze response to art and representation. By all evidence, this was a personal reaction, but always from a socio-denominational background. There often are people who enjoy individual rights inside a community, whitout noticing or demanding them, but who simply use them. Painting with the necessary ignorance, when it was not the figure forbidden by Islam, allowed them for a moment to bring an internal world to the light.

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It is clear that Fakih’s interest lays in the history of Druze painting. His development was not only linked to a search for figures in manuscripts, but also to an esoteric tradition that relied on geometry and on the part of reality to which it was linked.