An Article by D.M. (929 words, 5 min. read)
Some exhibitions restore a voice that has long deserved to be heard where it first began. Darkness and Light, presented simultaneously at the Dalloul Art Collection and the Dalloul Art Foundation from July 24 until September 19, offers Lebanon its first major encounter with Nabil Kanso. Alongside the large-scale canvases displayed at the Collection, the Foundation presents a remarkable selection of ink drawings and watercolors that reveal another dimension of his creative universe. Although his work travelled through leading museums and institutions around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Kanso remained surprisingly discreet in the Lebanese artistic landscape. This exhibition finally reconnects his homeland with one of its most remarkable painters.
Painting History While It Was Still Happening
Nabil Kanso devoted his life to painting history as it unfolded. The Lebanese Civil War, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the invasion of Kuwait, the Gulf War and countless other tragedies became the heart of his work. Walking through the exhibition creates the striking feeling that many of these canvases could have been painted yesterday. The cities, the refugees, the children, the mothers, the smoke, the flames and the faces marked by anguish belong as much to our present as to the years in which they were created. Time seems to have stood still inside these paintings.
A Language That Chose the Human Condition
During the decades when abstraction and geometry occupied much of the artistic scene and collectors sought works that naturally entered private interiors, Kanso remained faithful to another calling. His subject was the human condition. Every painting became inhabited by men and women caught in the violence of history, by children searching for protection, by horses, birds, skulls, shattered architecture and immense skies filled with movement.
These artistic choices also shaped the destiny of his work. The scale of the paintings and the weight of their subjects naturally found their place in museums rather than on the walls of private homes. They invite viewers to spend time with war, grief and resilience, making them works to experience as much as to admire. This may partly explain why Kanso remained less familiar to the wider public than many artists whose paintings entered private collections more easily. His audience grew instead through institutions, where the breadth of his vision could be experienced in its full dimension.
His paintings speak of compassion, dignity and survival through a visual language of extraordinary emotional intensity.
Paintings That Surround the Viewer
Many of the paintings presented at the Dalloul Art Collection immediately transform the relationship between artwork and spectator. Their monumental scale fills the space with extraordinary energy. Every step reveals another face, another movement, another fragment of the story. Layers of oil and acrylic overlap in an almost orchestral rhythm where drawing, color and movement become inseparable. These paintings were conceived on a scale that allows the viewer to enter them rather than simply observe them.
Darkness Guided by Light
The exhibition takes its title from Darkness and Light(1978), created within Kanso’s Faust series inspired by Goethe. The painting expresses one of the artist’s deepest convictions. Human history carries destruction and hope within the same journey. Throughout the exhibition, light emerges among the ruins. A child, a woman, a birth, a gaze or a luminous horizon becomes the silent thread that guides the eye through scenes of immense complexity. Kanso leaves each visitor free to reflect on the strength that continues to accompany the human experience.
The Intimacy of Ink
At the Dalloul Art Foundation, the ink drawings and watercolors reveal the same sensitivity through a completely different rhythm. Executed with remarkable spontaneity, these works possess the freshness of immediate observation. Among the most captivating are the scenes inspired by Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square between 1971 and 1974. Street life, cafés and the women of the former red-light district become part of a city observed with empathy and extraordinary freedom of line. These drawings already contain many of the ideas that would later expand into the large-scale paintings, allowing visitors to witness the evolution of Kanso’s way of seeing the world.
Return Home
Beyond the quality of the exhibition lies another emotion. Nabil Kanso returns to Lebanon through paintings that spent decades travelling across continents while remaining deeply connected to the country of his birth. They preserve memories of places, people and moments that continue to shape the collective imagination. Today, these works meet a Lebanese audience whose own experiences give them renewed resonance.
Darkness and Light restores an essential chapter of Lebanese art history. More than four decades after many of these paintings were created, they continue to speak with astonishing clarity, reminding us that great artists often see tomorrow long before the rest of us do.
