I’m an architect who paints and a painter who is aware of the visual necessities of creativity. But beyond those two roles, painting for me is primarily a selfish pleasure. I interact with the medium, the materials and myself. It’s a serious game and a silent conversation, given rhythm by the sound of the tools. It’s a moment of anxiety and relaxation all at once, a detachment from the real world, a journey, a considered diversion. You shed all constraints and models and let yourself be carried away by the painting and the way it is evolving before your eyes. Once the moment of creation is gone, the pleasure is over, ended, frozen at a stage considered definitive, but frozen all the same. That’s why I try to formalise the process itself as far as possible, without any theatrical Actionism. This is the main subject of my painting.

I think the viewer’s imagination is freer than that of the artist who has “finished” his work; the imagination of viewers is fresh, independent and disinterested. If their sensibilities or curiosity are aroused, they can let themselves be drawn in and wander in their own way through the fabric woven by the artist. Perhaps that’s all art is: a particular dialogue with particular people; a dialogue that’s aimless, gratuitous, sometimes fleeting, like the pleasures of life, and sometimes stronger, like a feeling.
Statement image

Frédéric Husseini graduated from the Ecole d’Architecture de Marseille-Luminy. He worked in France as an architect and entrepreneur before returning to Lebanon in 1991, where he worked in the industrial sector. In 2000 he was appointed Director General of Antiquities at the Ministry of Culture, a post he held until 2010.

His first exhibition, Art Kéo, took place in 2008 in Beirut. It revealed an aspect of his life he had hitherto kept secret, with works produced over several years. His painting reflects the abstract world which he is a part of, juxtaposing substance, transparency, planes, geometry, traces and imprints. He uses a vocabulary of actions that give materiality to the space-time of his paintings, revealing each as a process in movement. His abstract approach uses the same language while exploring new routes.

Frédéric Husseini (b.1957)

Jazz à Bey

Visualising the text of René Borruey, "Jazz à Bey", around the work of Frédéric Husseini. This video was screened during the RESISTANCES exhibition at 'Gallery 169' Saifi Village, Beirut.