Hassan Jouni

Born at Roumin in South Lebanon, Hassan Jouni holds the diploma of the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (1964) and of the Foster Academy of Fine Arts (Spain, 1965). He was a teacher of drawing at the San Fernando Institute in Madrid in 1970. He has held a number of exhibitions in Lebanon, and participated in several others abroad, notably in Kuwait, Syria and West Germany as well as in the Biennales of Sao Paulo (Brazil), Alexandria, and Baghdad.

His public is struck by that boldness which gives him the confidence he places in himself and his work. His canvases are expressed in multiple languages; with total candor he sets forth the multiple movements of his self, in the manner of very great artists who act only on the prompting of some inner transport, an inspiration coming from the depths of his faculties and his innermost impulses. There he also records the sensation he has of the weight of irremediable anguish born of solitude and the violent desire for a universe on whose threshold fear would stop.

His artistic hand is sometimes lyrical, sometimes descriptive, but it is always the heart in him which addresses itself to others. This perhaps is what explains that romantic atmosphere in which his work is bathed, and also that descriptive learning which causes him to sketch the future of the human conscience by giving it the coloring of South Lebanon – which is in fact the coloring of the whole of Lebanon.

And indeed, it is the colors which play the leading role in his work, translating the inner power which his work contains. In their variety, theses colors do not constitute an accidental element; they are indissociable from the architectonics of each canvas, the very essence even. Hassan Jouni plays with the colors, blending them one with the other with supreme intelligence in order to arrive at the furthest possible limits of contrast.