Jamil Molaeb on a painting composition

Author MolaebFestival

Jamil Molaeb talking about the composition of a painting.

Filmed in an interview in Costa Cafè - Hamra Street - Beirut.

جميل ملاعب

Molaeb is a curious mixture of a thinker and mystic. He shows throughout his abstract work his interest in the Druze cabalistic tradition and the way it conflates notions of boundless space with divine light.

Jamil Molaeb's signature paintings conceive of the color field - the ultimate destination for an abstract painter -as a traditional landscape, and evokes through those minimal pictorial frameworks, the magic simplicity of miniatures and icons. In his large colorful paintings, constructed in a simple identical operation, symbols emerge out of their alphabet and bifurcate into solid architectural forms, creating uncanny aerial like views, operating often as cultural archetypes. There is also a place for genre painting, however executed in an expressionist style, while not shying away from the folklore element. In his woodcuts, Molaeb demonstrates a unique skill to converse between parallel techniques, temporalities and concepts: Resorting to a traditional technique, inherited from the Italian 15th century (coeval with the first oils on canvas), the artist deploys quintessential modernist strategies that would be easily read by the expressionist and post-expressionist painters of Europe, indubitably alerted by his bright palette combined with primal archetypes, characteristic of pre-classical art.

He built his own Museum - ''Jamil Molaeb Museum'' in Baissour Mount-Lebanon.