Hussein Madi was born in 1938 in Chabaa, a border village at the foot of Mount Hermon in South Lebanon, and died on January 17th 2024, in Beirut.
Painter, sculptor and engraver, he received his initial training at ALBA. Subsequently, he went to Rome where he enrolled at the Academia di Belle Arte and at the Academia di San Jacomo.
In Rome he did advanced research into the cultural heritage of the Arabic East and of Egypt. He went back to Lebanon and taught sculpture and engraving at the institute of Fine Arts of the Lebanese University and, from 1958 to 1962, at ALBA. Since 1964 Madi has been living between Beirut and Rome. He has been exhibiting in Europe since 1965.
The Italian critic Joseph Silvaggi writes about Madi: "His drawings are filled with symbols and rich with artistic conventions in simplified forms; they are an enchanted script, a résumé of figurative art, the art of modern man."
Hussein Madi makes use of the art of calligraphy, today consisting of symbols, which were originally pictograms. Madi tries to take these symbols back to the time when writing was half-picture, half-symbol. He has thus reconciled the real, represented by a partial image, with the symbolic, connected with the inner life of man. Between these two poles, he has built marvelous worlds, the realistic one, which binds man to the earth and the symbolic one binding man to his conception of the world. In this manner, he satisfies both the eye and the mind at the same time.
With exceptional power, Madi outlines a silhouette of man on the entire surface of the canvas with two quick strokes of his large brush. A vertical line and a curved one make up the frame of this stylized painting. The features of his characters are those of the Oriental man clearly showing his cultural heritage. In their attitudes, two expressions are found: a static one which shows permanence in the face of the transitory, and the deep Oriental faith in immortality and eternal rest, and also a facial expression of cruel irony, playing the part of the mask in the Greek tragedy or an expression of suffering through stiff posture, like the loud outburst of a horrible cry, the terrible roar of the Assyrian lioness dragging along her crushed rump. This rending roar personifies the cry of Humanity.
In Hussein Madi statues, one finds a creative power, which translates human feelings. It already existed in the Oriental artistic heritage and has started again to play its civilizing role in the art of today.
Publications:
"The Art of Madi", 2004, Al-Saqi Publisher E. Benezit, Grund 1999, Volume 8, page 945
