Untitled (041A7706), 2024
29.7 x 42.0 cm
This work is by Mohammad, one of the more complicated children Karine Wehbé, the founder of the organisation Streetcolors, has worked with. He took Hatim’s place when he left with his family for Syria, in their room in the apartment block near the parking lot. Mohammad’s family experienced life under Daesh (ISIS), then fled to Lebanon, lived in a camp, moving a lot, and finally getting there temporarily. He was 10 and was already working with his father and also got a job at a hairdresser’s, working every day to help his family, who came to depend on him.
Similar to the other work in this publication that was based on an image he saw on a phone, Wehbé feels that it is his psychological state of mind that he expresses here, “as if something or someone is hidden, like he’s hiding and watching.” All the drawings he did are very, very dark. He loves using black a lot. It could be an image of himself, she feels, emerging from the darkness.
In summer 2025, he did a shockingly courageous act. Mohammad left with his family for Syria even though he wanted to stay with his father, who was going to remain in Beirut for work, but in the end he joined the others. After a few days away, he showed up alone. He had left from a suburb in Damascus, went through the frontiers, swam across the sea, and got back to their exact location in Beirut over two days of journey. One can witness his wild and independent spirit in this work.
Medium: Painting
Frame: unframed
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Close considerations
Unlike Mohammad’s other work of the playful monster emerging from chaos, this painting, an ink and paint brushwork reads like combed lines dragged across the paper in a nocturnal, low-frequency humming mood. The palette is black and grey-violet with a single, saturated resplendent ultramarine dome over the head, with incidental pink and brown flecks of residue reinforcing the rawness of the process.
The front-facing figure follows a strong hierarchy with emphasis on marks which fade as they reach the bottom where the head set atop a blocky torso straddles on two barely visible legs that seems to bend to the right where the source of tension seen in the figure lies. Everything except solid parts of the head expose the empty white background, rendering the depicted forms ghostly and transient.
Under the dominating dome there is a black mask for face and two rectangular eyes with heavy lids glancing to the side suspiciously at an elementary structure of a large tree and an apartment block further away in a deliberately schematic arrangement. The eyes creating an instant narrative of wariness, suspicion, and even aggression are rendered in a classic cartoon style found in comics.
There is a horizontal bottom-adjacent mass built with several layers of the banded stripes of the combed lines from the same wet-to-dry brush separating the figure from what it apprehends. The mouth also rendered with banded stripes, stretched and open towards the same side the eyes are pointed to, forms a jeering expression.
Around the figure are frame-like borders made from wavering contour strokes, so the scene is set inside a panel in a systematic arrangement contrasted by the irregular drifting movement of the gesture, creating a productive tension.
Within the chromatic blue scheme of the painting the heavy ultramarine dome on the figure’s head which reads like a protective shell representing the figure’s aura. This with the mask is the most solid part of the painting.
Process
This ink and paint on paper work is made in the same way as most children at Streetcolors Beirut run by Karine Wehbé; sat down, bent over, and standing over the work and through several sessions, and developing styles that are their own with specific sets of forms and colours of interest.
They are supported by the volunteers who help them handle their tools and prevent them from creating a violent mess. Children who started making artwork with them have found a balance in their mental states. Those who started out frozen and unable to speak found the ability to expand their scope and began making friends; and those who started out extremely violent and aggressive became more settled over time.
Visual echoes
This painting recalls Phillip Guston’s helmeted emblematic figures with a cartoonish physiognomy and uneasy expressions, Saul Steingberg’s images of schematic staging set within architectural panels; and Robert Nava’s feral monsters rendered in fast improvisation with playful menace in the eyes and teeth.