Chapter 1 - Lebanon in Three Parts

Summary

The canvas hefted onto the walls stretched across the far length of the warehouse. Paintings in various stages of completion were hung to dry on the surrounding panels. For months, he’d flit between them, layering on broad strokes of paint until life itself seemed to emanate from the walls before him. Every scream of agony painted onto the canvas was matched by a flash of white-green light brushed into the artwork's center. There it pulsed, a promise that staved off the death and destruction that reigned on around him.

As is often the case with Kanso's mural-scale art, Lebanon is composed in three parts (Figure 1.1). Its centermost scene is dominated by the figures of two leaping women reaching out for a single pearl of white-green light. Though the women are close enough, they do not actually touch. Instead, their bodies together triangulate a shelter below which several other figures are foregrounded. A mother, hands bloodied, grips a child who has, in turn, caught a fish from the sea that roils furiously on around them. The curves of the leaping fish become first the mane of a forlorn stallion and then the long, sweeping hair of yet another grieving woman. Above them, the single point that is the orb pulses relentlessly outward, with ripples of power and paint catching all else in its figurative wind. Bright white strokes foreground this orb within what is an otherwise overwhelming deluge of color. “Against the black, yellow, red, and orange that flows over these works,” says art critic Rob Wehner, “this white seems to pierce the canvas and gives the paintings the balance and strength they need to grasp the emotions Kanso tries to portray.”

Beyond the orb, firebirds sweep across a burning, smoke-filled sky that has managed to obscure even the sun itself. Thick, hazy swatches of paint flow over the yellow disk from the right where an apartment building has caught fire. There, dark black smoke mushrooms out of the windows in a chaotic medley of lines, curves, and colors. At one point in the rightmost composition, the windows appear to become an omniscient pair of eyes. Where they stare forcefully out at the scene, elsewhere in the bottom right, mothers bow their heads in grief. They hold their children close and shield their eyes from the devastation.