Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1949

EDUCATION

1968-1969
Guvder Art School, Beirut

1969-1971
London College of Printing

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2005
Galerie Surface Libre, Jal el Dib, Lebanon

2002
Galerie Rochane, Verdun, Beirut, Lebanon

1999
Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste, Beirut, Lebanon

1996
Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste, Beirut, Lebanon

1994
Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste, Beirut, Lebanon

1992
AGBU Art Gallery, Los Angeles

1991
Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Los Angeles

1988
Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste, Kaslik, Lebanon

1987
Galerie Épreuve d’Artiste, Kaslik, Lebanon

1986
Araradian Cultural Center, Jeitawi, Lebanon

1984
Galerie Chahine, Verdun & Kaslik, Lebanon

DOUBLE PERPETUAL MOVEMENT
By Jo Tarrab

Solicited both by the human body and oil painting, Missak Terzian gave himself at first to stylized figuration with a cubistic slant. His natural impetuosity, zest and bravura as an inborn colorist carried him soon towards a vibrating lyricism of the brushstroke. Guided by the body’s outline as organizing pattern, his brush assaults became the true motif of his canvasses.

His favorite subject, the double bodily scheme of the seated couple, spotted oddly enough in the random criss-cross of black paint drippings of a Jackson Pollock’s work, motivates, directs and manages in a way the painter’s interventions, very few of them being concerned with iconic representation. Often a certain time of observation or even decipherment is required to detect and make out, amongst what seems to be a chaotic tangle, the main features of the body, the ‘strange attractors’ of the head, shoulders, breast, arms and legs.

The surface of the canvas is a field of multidirectional forces-colors. Seen one by one or in restricted zones, they seem to be totally abstract, scattered, incoherent and meaningless, were if not for the underlying regulating scheme that magnetizes them, lending them convergence, coherence and signification. The figuration results from a combination of graphic and chromatic non figurative elements.

This description applies mainly to Missak Terzian’s middle production period. The earlier period offers a more straightforward reading of the couple as an image of complementary duality, intimacy and tenderness but also of stability and permanence, in striking contrast with the frantic dynamism of the brushstrokes and the heated fauvism of the color scheme.

In the subsequent period, a triangular abyss tapering towards the center of the bottom edge of the canvas opens up between the legs of the anonymous or rather universal couple. After that, the couple tends to disappear almost completely as a recognizable motif by turning into vertical filiform strokes where torso, arms and buttocks are barely marked by delicate inflexions of the brush with colors that have lost their once expressionistic intensity to take on more understated tints and shades.

The painter does not need anymore to assert himself in the excess of an overflowing expressive energy. A minimalist proceeding takes over, a murmur instead of a scream, without affecting either the spontaneity or the swiftness of execution.

Missak Terzian’s paintings are constructed by deconstruction and deconstructed by construction. To find their way inside them, the onlookers have to identify with that double paradoxical perpetual movement, the very same that continually does and undoes couples and human communities.

Jo Tarrab is a writer and an art critic who resides in Beirut City.