Who Bears The Banner…?

Elias Zayyat

Al-Hayat  Newspaper —  October 10, 2010

Nasr Warour and the art of THE DUST B.E.T.W.E.E.N

Nasr Warour walks a path he himself has deliberately prepared—having resolved early on to commit his entire being to a vocation that revealed itself at the moment he first aspired toward an art capable of wholeness:

an art of totality, where idea and proposition converge and meaning attains clarity.

This commitment finds one of its most condensed and luminous expressions in The Dust Between, a body of work exhibited in 2010, in which intuition and vision intertwine to form a sustained inquiry into material presence, perception, and becoming.

From the outset, it is as though Warour understood that such a path requires a precise alphabet of knowledge—one legible in the shared language of poetry and music, of architecture in its abstraction, of music in its rhythm and tonal structure, and of poetry in its symbolic and mystical resonances.

Warour’s practice arises from a mastery shaped by this accumulated and deeply internalized knowledge. It is a knowledge at once intuitive and rational, stable yet perpetually in motion. For the essence of artistic work lies in creative integration: a balance in which intuitive reason tempers itself, and in which the mutable finds equilibrium with the constant. This integration unfolds through the relationships between elements—line and colour, spatial organization, and the saturation of form with expression—ascending toward a state of visual astonishment.

For this reason, Warour’s works demand a close and attentive reading.

Line, in Warour’s work, governs all chromatic processes. It regulates trunks and branches across the four cosmic directions, preparing the pathways of sap as it rises and descends. This sap is colour itself—colour in its most venerated sense: colour elevated to a privileged status within the work.

The line is as clear as light, as incisive as a blade. It delineates boundaries with the precision of a master’s plane, then withdraws by deliberate will, addressing colour as if to say: now speak. And colour does speak.

In The Dust Between, colour forms a plate of essential matter—illuminated simultaneously from behind and from the front by the transformations of daylight. This surface is veiled in a semiotic enamel: at times geometric, at others crystalline or iridescent. Yet this veiling is meticulously wrought, as lucid as trees washed by the first rains of October. The sky remains sky, even when it settles at the bottom of the canvas; and purple belongs equally to the earth and to the towers of the city.

Warour, arrived bearing the civilizations of yesterday while touching the existential space of the contemporary human being and his manifestations.

By the civilizations of yesterday, I refer first to Arabic miniature painting of the Abbasid period, in which Muslim and Syriac artists copied manuscripts and adorned selected pages with coloured images. Their approach relied on line and colour as carriers of meaning embedded within the textual fabric of the manuscript itself—most notably in the works of al-Wasiti and the schools of Mosul and Baghdad.

I also refer to Umayyad mural painting, preserved in significant examples across the Levant, where line and colour operated in a reciprocal and reinforcing relationship, as seen in Qasr al-Hayr and Qusayr ‘Amra.

Warour’s concentration on line and colour echoes these Arab and Levantine traditions. Yet although he has absorbed them profoundly, he does not deploy them as a revival of historical style. Rather, in The Dust Between, he articulates a vision addressed to the contemporary human being—one who approaches visual art through expression, enigma, and a distinctly modern technical formulation.

It is therefore unsurprising that Warour has neither succumbed to thematic seductions nor drifted toward a nihilistic rejection of the trajectory of contemporary Arab art. His work stands apart: grounded in knowledge of art, yet acutely conscious of the fertile seeds embedded in his own cultural inheritance—nourished by the waters of the Orontes and the Tigris, and sustained by a lucid and balanced vision.

Nasr Warour emerges from words already spoken and achievements already realized within Syrian art. Yet he continues to sing alone—carrying the banner through pen and brush alike.

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About The Author

Elias Zayyat (1935–2022) was one of the most influential figures in Syrian modern art—a painter, iconographer, restorer, writer, and cultural thinker whose legacy occupies a foundational place in both Syrian and Arab visual culture.

Born in Damascus in 1935, in Bab Touma (Gate of Thomas), Zayyat received his early education in Damascus before pursuing formal art studies abroad. He graduated in oil painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia in 1960, continued his studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, and later specialized in art restoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, graduating in 1973. This dual formation—as painter and restorer—profoundly shaped his artistic and intellectual approach.

Zayyat’s work is distinguished by a deep engagement with sacred and spiritual art, particularly Syrian and Eastern Christian iconography, which he approached not as a fixed tradition but as a living visual language. Drawing on ancient Syrian civilizations, early Christian art, mythology, and architecture, he developed a singular pictorial vocabulary marked by refined line, symbolic density, and a luminous chromatic sensibility. His paintings achieve a rare synthesis between the sacred and the mythical, the historical and the contemporary.

Over the course of his long career, Zayyat decorated and restored numerous churches across Syria, contributing decisively to the development of a distinctly local Syrian iconographic tradition. His icons and murals are recognized for their spiritual intensity, compositional clarity, and unique color harmonies, bearing an unmistakable personal imprint.

Alongside his artistic production, Zayyat played a pivotal institutional role in Syrian art. He was among the founding figures of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University, where he taught from its establishment and held positions as Head of the Department of Fine Arts and Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs. In 1980, he was awarded the rank of Professor. His book Techniques of Painting and Its Materials, first published by Damascus University in 1981–1982, remains an important pedagogical reference.

As a writer and critic, Zayyat authored numerous essays on art, iconography, and restoration, articulating a rigorous and ethical vision of contemporary art rooted in knowledge, cultural continuity, and humanistic values. He consistently rejected superficial revivalism, advocating instead for an art that reconciles historical depth with modern consciousness.

Widely regarded as a spiritual father to generations of Syrian artists, Elias Zayyat remains a central reference in the history of Syrian modern art—an artist whose work embodies both rootedness and transcendence.