Ab-Anbar is pleased to present The Symphony of Birds, Fadia Haddad’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together a new body of work from her ongoing ‘Birds’ series, the exhibition approaches the bird as a figure of unbounded movement, free from borders, categories, and the constraints.
For several years now, Fadia Haddad has been painting birds. She works in series, exploring and developing them until they exhaust themselves. But now, birds have begun to inhabit her universe. What is it that keeps calling her back to them?
In truth, the answer is very simple: “They fly,” the artist says, “without being confined to or defined by any borders.” Coming from Lebanon, Haddad carries an inherent longing for the freedom of movement, a longing that birds seem to personify without any need for justification.
When she paints, Fadia lays her canvases, paints, and brushes on the floor. Her gestures strike the surface of her support with a kind of fierce urgency, continuing until the image seems to lift itself from the ground, showing us the bird and the cosmos in a single, forceful sweep. This final image never appears at once; it emerges slowly, often after a long, demanding process that pushes both body and mind to its limits. The viewer can sense this passage of time (sometimes running on for months) in the very weight of the canvases, their thick surfaces bearing the accumulated traces of countless reworkings. Each painting is the outcome of a relentless search for something absolute, shaped through gestures and pigments suspended in water-soluble mediums. To define a detail as essential as the curve of a beak, Haddad sweeps colour across the surface, glides it gently with a wide brush, pushes it forward with a broom, or scratches into the paint until the form finally reveals itself.
In order for the work to move from the ground to the vertical plane, the artist first requires what she calls a “symphony.” This musical concept takes form on the canvas through colourful harmony, the creation of space (in this case, the sky, the cosmos) and the atmosphere. The complex textures of the “symphony” consist of elements that can strike the viewer from afar through their movement, rhythm, direction, wave, or line (similar to the trail left by certain planes in the sky). Up close, however, the “symphonies” are more like quasi-physical sensations, or Art Historian Benard Berenson readily used the term “tactile painting.” The eye catches details of steam, air currents, passing drizzle, even bubbles, or simply something less definable, giving the impression that the space, like the human skin, sometimes seems to breathe.
Haddad’s birds are solitary, in part because we never quite grasp them in their entirety. She is not drawn to them for traits that could classify them or anchor them to a particular species. Their appeal lies in the way they slip beyond identification. They enter, they leave, they pass by, they examine us and even worry us from time to time, but they remain fundamentally elusive and free.
The artist’s brushwork creates sharp curves like shards of glass. Her birds, ever vigilant, capture the viewer with their plumage, smooth or ruffled, made of primarily tactile sensations. Brush marks emerge from unsuspecting feathers in parallel or fan-shaped rhythms, with spots, or with pearly, ocellated markings.
Sometimes the bird seems motionless, spying on us out of the corner of its eye, but more often we catch it in a fleeting approach. At times, the birds fly and confront us with the transience of all things. After the artist’s struggle with matter to bring forth her cosmic universe, it is up to the viewer to discover and take the time to enter her symphony of birds; and to fly with them into space, at full speed!
Fadia Haddad (b. 1959, Lebanon, Beirut), lives and works in Paris. After graduating from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut in 1984, Haddad continued her studies at L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris until 1988.
Fadia Haddad's solo exhibitions include Rétrospectivement, Histoires d’oiseaux, de peintures et de sentiments, Alice Mogabgab Gallery, Beirut (2021); Mask, Salon l’Ecritoire, Berlin (2020); Break the frame, Beit Beirut Museum & Urban Cultural Center, Beirut (2018); Mask, Galerie Michel Rein, Brussels (2016). Haddad has an extensive group exhibition history, including: Art Busan 12e Edition, Sabine Vazieux Gallery, Seoul (2023); Group show, La Fabrique - Centre d’Art, Montreuil (2022); Women of Resilience, Tsichritzs Visual Arts Foundation, Kifissia & Athens (2019); Regards croisés, Institut du Monde arabe, Paris (2011).
Haddad's work is part of numerous private and public collections: Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE; Patrimoine de l'Humanité, Geneva; Artistic Memories of the 20th Century, New York; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), Paris; the CNAP, Paris; PINTO, Paris. In 2011, Harry Bellet consecrated a monograph to her work in a publication from Area Descartes and Company, Traversée.
