“LE
SEIGNEUR”
OF THE TRUE, AUTHENTIC NOSTALGIC CLASSICISM ART OF THE LAND AND NATURE OF
THE MIDDLE EAST!
By Maximillien de Lafayette
There
are two ways of admiring, feeling, understanding and loving the paintings of
Maestro Joseph Matar. One is Pascalian academic and purely epistemologically
artistic, if you are an art lover, a connoisseur, an art critic or
tentatively you pretend to be one.
The other way is more human,
more sensitive, more realistic, delicate, fragile, truthful and infinitely
more humanistic, if you are a Near Easterner or precisely a proud Lebanese
of the good old days of Lebanon the Great “Le Grand Liban”, not the Lebanon
we hear and read about today and since September 15, 1975. I will explain
those two differences because they are of a paramount importance and a
primordial pre-requisite to understand and truthfully appreciate the art of
Maestro, Professor, Dr. Joseph Matar (Yes, he has all these titles).
For
his paintings are a narrative panoramic socio-ecologico-historical
chronicle, a documentary and a sequence of frames and pictures of a vanished
golden, majestic, splendidly beautiful of the land and people of Lebanon.
Thus,
if you are not a native of the land of Maestro Matar, then, I should invite
you to embark with me on a long and divinely beautiful journey to the
wonderlands we have already seen on Matar’s canvases. You will enjoy the
journey… beautiful “Lebanon-Yesteryears” sun rays of one thousand colors
will sleep and awake in your eyes while warm tears escaping on the small
landscape of your palm will bring you back to “Lebanon-Today”, an
atrocious human reality.
This is what you are about
to feel and sense upon sailing into the paintings of Maestro Matar. A real
genius, a multi-dimensional master of Middle Eastern Painting.
More Next