Stelio SCAMANGA (Liban, 1934-2021) Lot n° 50

Ultimate Abstraction Oil on canvas 80 x 80 cm painted in 2021 *** Oil on canvas painted in 2021 Private collection, Paris A certificate, signed by the artist, will be given to the buyer. THE SCAMANGA GALAXY "This completely assimilated use of generalized visual contrast, the most violent, the most shocking possible between the elements (so far from the seraphism of the last paintings of the previous cycle) gives the tiny mass of textured colors an astonishing, extraordinary, supernatural presence: this is how, it is said, the illumination catches the Zen monk who enters, as in a hurricane, the quietude of the Satori. These paintings have a Japanese accuracy in the extreme economy of means that embrace the essence of the movement of emergence from nowhere. In this taste, so profoundly oriental, of chromatic violence, there is an explosion of exultant joy, to be contrasted with the tragic barbaric explosion which inaugurates the first cycle: but an explosion of solitary joy in a tragic world. And this joy, it is also, strangely returned in this different world like a fabulous jewel in a case of night, the core, the luminous node, become core and chromatic node, shooting star. Expression no longer of the long and tortuous path towards the unattainable truth, but in the dazzling singularity of the instantaneous apprehension of the true (of the value, whatever it is) in a fleeting moment of meteoric lucidity. Undoubtedly, Scamanga has, approaching as close as possible to the luminous center in the recent research, to realize that the truth, the happiness, the salvation, the power, the ecstasy do not exist as such, and that only exist flashes of ecstasy, of power, of salvation, of happiness, of truth, drawn for an instant to the ocean of the darkness that surrounds us to be abyssed there at once. And that the umaine is perhaps only a similar flash in front of the eternity of the time, of the matter, of the energy, to death. And that perhaps the truth of the man consists in making himself hunter of lightnings. Otherwise of pure aesthetic experiences, in a disposition of spirit open to the enjoyment and the wonder. Because to marvel it is necessary to perceive, but to perceive it is necessary to marvel This new system of contrasts (masses, dimensions, colors, materials, movements, direction, expressive feelings) between the background and the figure in the new paintings has a coherence and an internal logic that can only be dynamic, proposing the elements of an evolutionary future. What best characterizes Scamanga's approach, beyond his will affirmed from the beginning to free himself from any foreign influence by elaborating with sincerity ("Sincerity is what counts the most for me") and modesty a resolutely original painting, while being at the same time resolutely contemporary and resolutely anchored in the mental universe of the East, it is the capacity that he has of ca coherent sets of emergent configurations whose elements are at the same time hautem concrete and strongly abstract. And it is this double movement of incarnation of the abstract in the cone and sublimation of the concrete in the abstract, at the point of equilibrium where the actualization of the one balances virtualization of the other, that gives to Scamanga's works their aesthetic closure, their human weight, their artistic scope and meaning, their impact and their universal appeal. Each one is a complete, finished, closed on itself, which does not need to be apprehended and played of any external reference to the laws that it imposes to the painted surface. Only the true artists become to this authority and to this autonomy of the singular work. Joseph Tarrab 9/9/1974