Hanibal Srouji Lebanon, 1957

Contemporary Lebanese artist Hanibal Srouji was born in Beirut in 1957. He resided in Saida, Southern Lebanon, before immigrating with his family to Canada in 1976. Before plunging into the multidisciplinary realm of art, Srouji completed a degree in Social Sciences at Vanier College in 1978, where he explored interests in mathematics and chemistry. He obtained a B.F.A. in Fine Arts in 1982 and an M.F.A. in 1987 from Concordia University in Montréal. Towards the end of his education at concordia, Srouji accomplished his thesis study at the École des Braux-arts in Nîmes, where he received a Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique (D.N.S.E.P) in 1987. He taught at different universities in the United States, Canada, and France, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the Lebanese American University in Beirut, where he holds today the position of Associate Professor. 

After spending the first year of the Lebanese civil war working as a Red Cross volunteer, Srouji escaped the violence on a cargo boat from Saida to Cyprus, where he emigrated to Canada. Though he was able to avoid the majority of the war, his experiences with the Red Cross marked forever, and his displacement from Lebanon generated great agony that he would later address through his art. The brutality of the war did not only inspire pessimism in this artist, however. 

At his family home in Saida, his father kept over fifty birds in an outdoor cage, which sang every morning. When a close bomb exploded at the outset of the civil war, the cage was blown open without killing all the animals inside it; as the birds flew free, Srouji realized the possibility of bliss, liberty, or enlightenment through the disaster. 

As a painter, Srouji strikes an uncommon balance between nostalgic, symbolic motifs and colorful, luminous palettes. On untreated canvas, which the artist sees as an extension of his skin, he sets his marks with an amalgam of tools and materials, including fire, calque paper rust, acid, acrylic paint, and water. Replacing light with fire and figures with blemishes of color, Srouji creates musical visuals inspired by the romantic tunes of Chopin, Schubert, and Bach. His abstract, open compositions are at once somber and playful, evoking both magic and chemistry, and suggesting an engagement with the dream worlds of the unconscious. Sublimation is a given in  Srouji's account of artistic creation. He restructures any destructive vigor - be it war, environmental abuse, or societal agression - into a constructive one, attempting to create a complex, contemplative picture of hope and optimism. In his early years, his paintings were populated with gestural, lyrical abstractions. Following his first exhibition in Lebanon in 1997, he became known for burning small holes and lines into his works with a blowtorch. These marks evoke bullet holes, reminding the viewer of the walls of Beirut buildings marred by the fighting of the civil war - and of the psyches of those who lived through it, equally if less visibly scarred. In his abstract compositions, the "bullet hole" works as a shared symbol of a generation of war, to strongly condemn its violence and urge reconciliation. 

In 1996, in keeping with these ideals, Srouji creating Healing Bands, long, free, narrow painted canvases that hang from the ceiling of the exhibition space. These works draw inspiration from Ethiopian healing scrolls, which have been used for over a thousand years as a means of purging evil spirits and demons from the body of a sick person. Part of a more extensive healing ritual, the scrolls are meant to be used in conjunction with plant, animal, and chemical-based medicines; while medication alleviates physical symptoms, the scrolls are meant to soothe spiritual ones. Significantly, Ethiopian healing scrolls are used by members of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths alike; Srouji here suggests a means of spiritual healing that cuts across the sectarian divisions of the civil war to soothe individual souls. 

As is suggested by Healing Bands, Srouji's work has long engaged with questions of spirituality, peace, and inner freedom. Especially in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, which witnessed large-scale violations of human rights in the interest of "security", Srouji began to toy with themes of escape and liberation. In Cage (2006), he expresses his internal imprisonment in a world of imposed Western conformity through a series of diptychs reminiscent of Mustapha Farroukh's The Two Prisoners (1929). In keeping with his signature style, Srouji grappels with his somber subject matter against the light, peaceful backgrounds with colorful peripheral stripes and bright petals and clouds finding their way through gridded bars-perhaps to guide us to the strange story of the escape of his childhood birds. 

After three decades working primarly with dyptychs, Srouji returned to the Lebanese art scene in 2010 with one of his most colorful works: a series of large-scale vertical paintings entitled Land and Sea, which feature stratified, impressionistic washes of paint piling atop one another in impressions of land, sea and endless sky. These pictures defy gravity as they display depth and distance in three vertical planes, defying Western linear perspective in ways reminiscent of Oriental landscape painting and islamic miniatures. In his latest works, Srouji reconciles with his homeland, proposing a rebirth of Middle Eastern art that is capable of creation beyong the rage of war.