Saliba Douaihy

Private Collection, Lebanon (acquired directly from the artist in 1968)
By descent to the present owner 

This work is in very good condition, and is accompanied with professional condition report issued by Simon Gillespie Studio, London. The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, with the overall tonality being more vibrant in the original.
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Born in Ehden the northern mountains of Lebanon, Saliba Douaihy was first inspired by the brick churches in his country hometown. At an early age Douaihy worked under the tutelage of the portrait painter Habib Srour, who helped refine his early technique, and encouraged his depiction of religious scenes in the vicinity.

Douaihy then set about developing his own style, inextricable from the calmness of the country’s landscape, producing pastel coloured pictures of rustic villages and local architecture.  This early work combined the premise of figurative art with hints of minimalism, in turn revealing his knowledge of the European artistic method.

Yet a dramatic change to his style occurred after his immigration to New York in the 1950’s, where he was exposed to the animated art scene there, characterized by a burgeoning abstract expressionist movement including the likes of Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and Hans Hofmann. Their artistic posture and style was to turn him away from a strict academic style towards abstract minimalist painting. This became the formative and most celebrated period of Douaihy’s style, as flat monochromatic forms entered his paintings, emphasized by straight lines and hard edges.

From then on Douaihy worked in solitude in the loft of a Maronite Church in Brooklyn heights, introducing a spiritual serenity into his works that comments on the philosophies of Kant, and references the colour practices of Josef Albers. Indeed Douaihy aimed to reach the sublime through a medium of flat and minimal forms and lines, eschewing superfluous features in return for elegant and nuanced constructions.

Douaihy continued to mature artistically until he passed away in 1994, as he strived constantly to reach absolute reduction in structure and palette.

The present example embodies the most discerning aspects of Douaihy’s technique; as an ocean of marine is buttressed by a trifecta of red-orange-yellow along the left hand edge. A sharply balanced sky blue triangle spans the top left corner. Taken together, Douaihy imparts a sense of two-dimensionality without perspective, a landscape out of focus, stripped of it’s detail and digressions. The result is the residue of a deeply involved and harmonious reduction.