Marzouk Ibrahim 

Beirut, 1937-Beirut, 1975

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A few years before his death, Marzouk began the elaboration and implementation of a personal mythology, which would change the direction of his work. A man of obsessions, anxiety and humor, he presented himself in his salon in Beirut painting a Boucher nude while sitting in a Louis XV armchair made in Tripoli. He used humor as an instrument of continual shifts: with one hint after another, light and narcissist, his humor was inoffensive to others, but sufficiently biting to advance his own work.

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After five years at ALBA from 1954 to 1959, a one-year sojourn at the School of Fine Arts in Hyderabad, India in 1960 and a period in Italy from 1965 to 1967, he made a tour of all possible realisms. He understood that popular realism could not be coded according to the external signs of cafés, landscapes and mirrors, where spectators and painters project the image or the affect.

 

From this moment on, he painted his apartment and the elements of his personal life, at once realistic and transposed. His world became that of the symbols he painted: a sea shell, a woman’s face in a mirror, one of those small chests of drawers for make-up which one does not know if they take after a portable vanity or a shoeshine kit. All this came from psychoanalysis rather than from oneirism.

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It is striking to see how Marzouk’s apartment seemed to be a projection of his work, a setting composed of recognisable elements – which tried to integrate into his vocabulary, from the shoeshine chest to the dolls. 

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After his death on 8th October 1975, hit by a shell while standing in line to buy bread outside a bakery, nothing changed in his apartment in the Arab University area in Beirut, and one was invariably struck by the wardrobe where his painter friends had lined up his work. The sitting room stayed the same, with its Tripoli-style furniture – variations of an Egyptianised style, as if everyone dreamt of sitting on King Farouk’s throne. 

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Egyptian films had popularised this style throughout the Arab world, and homes furnished in this supposedly distinguished Egyptian Bey villa style flourished. 

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Yet there was a real sense of drama in all of Marzouk’s painting – and not a retrospective drama, due to the circumstances of his death. It is rather that Marzouk articulated the drama of parody in his paintings, as a distancing effect. He succeeded in establishing the link between the drama of his life – a rupture and painful awareness – and the objects that surrounded him, which became part of his painting. If, at the beginning, he only deployed these as obvious signs, his entire body of work still indicated the direction he was heading to : the setting of this blatant conflict, of this lie, of this painful discrepancy.  

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For him, the world was reduced to this metaphoric design – the mise en abîme of the disaster of metaphysics based on real elements, and yet already diverted. He made himself the echo of the echo of this drama. The reflection of a foot in a mirror was not, for him, a pictorial problem of modelling or rendering, but a problem of meaning and absence of meaning. Nothing could fill this void, not even the presence of objects. His stay in Hyderabad had confirmed that an other, rather than different, place existed: a place where the displacements of meaning were beginning to operate – displacements of objects that painting alone could take into account. He did not experience India as a tale from the Thousand and One Nights, but as a meaningful nightmare of what was expecting him. He came from a Sunni tradition and society, where painting shut itself off just when it seemed to be open to every possible experience, because figuration was not considered as its only purpose. How could he live within the framework of a painting style that did not fit into any milieu and which became an object, because of the decorative elements placed in it ? How could he speak about what was outside himself, but also essential to him ? How could he speak of the self when he was a stranger to himself ? Marzouk’s painting worked on the link between these two terms.

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He held two exhibitions in Beirut, in 1964 and 1968, at the Lebanese Association of Artists, Painters and Sculptors, and another in April 1974 at Gallery One.