An Article by A. V. (945 words, 5 min. read)
Ever since humans started etching on the walls of caves, there has been depictions of human figures, faceless, and in different shapes and forms, where the situation rather than the individual was emphasized and was intended to depict a scene or to paint a picture of an event.
In Scandinavia, stone carvings dating back to about 2000 B.C. were discovered, and amongst them were multiple depictions of such faceless human forms. The idea is therefore by no means original or unique.
The Renaissance
Fast forward to the Renaissance where between the 17th and 19th century, there was a shift in art towards painting portraits. Artists competed amongst each other playing with light and with human expression to go into the details that can emphasize human emotions, character, and the mood of a certain situation. Many artists excelled at making portraits a commodity that was only worthy or the rich and the worthy. The more portraits were mounted on a wall, the more the reflection of wealth of the home owner. Attention to detail was key, and many of those portraits are now housed in museums around the world for admirers to wonder at the beautiful depictions of deep emotions.
Modernism and Beyond
At the turn of the 20th century, the move away from portraits was mostly driven by the advent of photography which mostly replaced the painted portrait by photographs. It was then that artists realized that the mystery that lied in paintings where the face was mostly hidden added a dimension to the painting which was previously unexplored.
In the 1800’s, German painter Caspar David Friedrich pioneered the painting of figures looking at sublime landscapes, their backs toward the viewer. His famous painting of a couple peering out from a ship’s bow competes with the painting of a woman gazing from her window in being among the first paintings that launched this era of shying away from the detail of the face in master artworks.
In 1901, Danish artist Ida Hammershøi’s paintings had a recurrent mysterious woman painted from the back. Partly those paintings gave the observer a sensation of intimacy where one was peaking into the privacy of the character in the painting. Ida’s paintings are some of the most sought after paintings of all time.
Artists who adopted this trend include famous names such as Gideon Rubin and Renee Magaritte. Many artists later omitted the face completely and focuse solely on limbs. And in its extreme form of identity mystery, some artists hid their own faces or identities from the public, an example of that is Banksy whose true identity remains a mystery to this date.
Lebanese Artists and Faceless Paintings
Many Lebanese artists experimented with faceless paintings. Paul Guiragossian pioneered this art in depicting faceless figures, mainly in groups or communities, where the focus was more on the meaning of the moment, on the bonding and on family reunions rather than on the individual themselves. Shafic Abboud in the 1960s painted faceless humans and expanded is art into the abstraction of the human figure. Elie Kanaan’s abstract portraits rarely depicted any facial expression if any at all. Chawki Chamoun’s figures are mostly back views of miniature silhouettes who are admiring the beautiful mountains as they wait for something to happen.
In more recent times, we have witnessed multiple exhibitions where faceless art was the main and primary focus. Magali Katra’s faceless sillhouettes are magical and depict a sense of fluidity and motion portraying an expression, an idea, a stand, with zero input from the face. Wissam Beydoun’s faceless figures superimposed on backrounds as profound as the maps of Beirut are stunning in bringing the human emotion onto the geographical sense of a city. Mansour El Habre’s figurines are sometimes simple ink lines that talk to the observer through a posture or a pose, rather than through an expression of an eye, or a mouth or a face. Other artists who experimented with faceless figures include Yasmina Hilal, Rawad Ghattas (who even had a solo exhibition called “Faceless”, and, recently, Haibat Balaa Bawab whose solemn faceless figures graced a big portion of her most recent solo exhibition in Beirut.
We were surprised to see yet another exhibition toying with the theme of faceless paintings. There is nothing wrong with that, except that this one comes short of portraying anything new. The overwhelming sensation of the observer is that this is a collective of different artists who have already done this theme and somehow they are now collected in one confined space. Perhaps the medium used, watercolor, is relatively different, however, there has been a lot of watercolor masters who have exhibited figurative art that borderlines portrait, abstract, and mysterious “foggy” faces all at the same time. We are all too familiar with the artist being secure in their own comfort zone. When urged to get out of it and explore “something different” they mostly shy away from it, and rarely do find someone bold enough to make the leap and succeed at it. Calculated leaps should be applauded, but a leap into deja vu and familiar territory should be discouraged. The artist is sometimes blind to this, but someone on the outside, someone “outside the box” should act as a guide to give proper advice to the artist taking the leap in the wrong direction.
Innovation Stands the Test of Time
While deja vu art usually withers with time, creative innovations withstand the test of time and continue to fascinate generations to come.
