RABBIA SUKKARIEH: TRANSMUTING PAIN By JAY BELLOLI

Over the past forty years, my work as a curator has taught me that artists who undergo great suffering react to that pain through their art. Many can depict images of their experiences or can turn from those experiences and express the joy and vitality of life. A few artists explore a more difficult approach to unify their agonizing memories with the expression of energy and expansion. This latter possibility is the basis for the art of painter and sculptor Rabbia Sukkarieh.

Sukkarieh’s early life was a microcosm of the dynamic and unexpected forces that continue to shape her life and art today. She was born to an intellectual and philanthropic Islamic family in Baalbeck, Lebanon, a site of one of the most famous ancient Roman cities and whose strategic location has been a touchstone for major political and cultural transformations. Her parents never forced her and her siblings to follow traditional doctrines and, in fact, the children were raised to accept all beliefs as long as they represented justice. However, all the safety and normality of her childhood were soon dramatically transformed as Sukkarieh lost her community-leader father, got married, and witnessed the beginning of the indiscriminately destructive Lebanese civil war, all within her teenage years. At the peak of the civil war violence in the mid-in the 1980s, she was studying for her Bachelor in Fine Arts at the Lebanese University in Beirut, the country capital and the main center of the conflict. Sukkarieh remembers “counting over twenty bombs drop on and around [the building where she lived] in just one night.” 1 Bodies and street explosions, losing friends, and experiencing immediate threats to self, children and family became part of daily experience.

With a strong sense of hope and compassion, and to grapple with her deep emotions about loss and terror, Sukkarieh began to create performances in 1987, becoming the first performance artist in Lebanon. In her first performance, she wrapped green lace over the few still standing burnt and bullet-ridden pine tree trunks inside Kaskas Park, the only fenced park in Beirut which, by separating the fighting sides in the city, had been almost totally destroyed. In another performance in her native country, she and Many children dotted the sand-bag-lined alleys on the battle front lines with hundreds of tall hand-made stick-and-silk poppies; the blood-red delicate flowers are known in Arabic as “The Wounds of the Darling.” These are portrayed in the region’s mythology and in many ancient and modern wars to commemorate martyrs and to symbolize the victory of life over death. A last performance aired by the Lebanese Public television station, Illusion and Women, presented the conflictingly-viewed role of women in Lebanese society between preconceived notions, and the full expression of power they actually had during the war.

As violence and destruction intensified, Sukkarieh accepted a highly sought-after scholarship for exceptionally talented students to complete studies in the United States. This decision was a real-life existential embodiment of unifying agony and joy,\ which is at the core of most of her art. It meant tearing herself away from her family and beloved two sons in Lebanon. That seemed like the only way to grow and gain the strength she needed to help get them out of danger and reunite with them in her new country of residence. She quickly improved her English while working to support herself and her family before being admitted to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena for a second undergraduate degree and an M.F.A. There she continued to focus on her mixed media paintings and installations, while producing new performances to express the difficulty of feeling the immense cultural differences in the United States, and the sad tendency in all of us to separate humans into “Us” and “Them.” The exceptional quality and skill of her art allowed her to obtain the “Extraordinary Ability” permanent residency – American citizenship that permitted her finally to bring her sons to the U.S. and resolve much of the separation agony, and to achieve better integration into her new country of residence.

Still, Sukkarieh did not disconnect from the existential yet dramatic universal predicament with the constant waves of refugees clashing with the threats of violence that remained a common occurrence in Lebanon. These influences are most prominent in the expressionistic, large-scale aggressive forms, and frequent coloristic darkness of her paintings. Combined with these qualities is a powerful and organic sense of growth that fuses with the implicit destructiveness. Amazingly, the variety of hues in all her current oil paintings are created from only two healing oil paint colors, red and yellow, which she interweaves with black and white to emphasize the contrasts between ferocity and positive energy on her canvases.

Her largest and most dynamic work on canvas, Sabra 1, 2016, is twenty feet long with its vertical dimension representing the average height of all humans. This monumental work was built up with multitudinous, small organic areas of paint mingled together to create a loose yet dramatic central form that seems to plunge into the depths. Another very ambitious painting, the twelve-foot-long Sabra 2, 2017, uses extraordinarily complex shapes dominated with different hues of red to evoke blood as well as positive energy and renewal. In 2018, she created her first in a series of shaped canvases, the vigorous Cube Painting, which relates to a form she has also explored in the original one of her new small sculptures. In this painting, the emotional darkness has somewhat given way to a greater sense of revolting yet intense colorful beauty, which may imply her new direction of paintings in the near future.

The influence of the primordial and morphing life forces is also evident in Sukkarieh’s 2018 drawings. After long years of classical academic training, Sukkarieh has dedicated much of the last eight years to developing and refining hundreds of completed works, installations and complex drawings using models, illustrations and sculptures that are layered over and over in different ways through photography. She then transferred some of her complex color drawings to paper. A couple of the multicolored drawings from that series included in the exhibition exemplify her metaphoric use of colors, with jagged areas of red alluding to blood and areas of blue or gray evoking the healing aspects of water or gauze. She turned to numerous types of pencil to create intricate and carefully structured drawings. In these layered works the penciled marks are thick enough to subtly reflect light, and the forms at times seem to tear apart, almost conveying the dangers of barbed wire or even cosmic explosions. These greatly organic forms, like hanging bodies or massive corpses bulging out of ruins, work to interlock spontaneity and structure, deterioration and rebirth into one existence. These drawings elicit blended feelings of tremendous energy and dark beauty.

For her inexplicably complex and subtle sculptures, Sukkarieh pioneers in using natural wool, a material that recalls her grandmother’s rug-making in her parents’ home, and again connects her works in three-dimensions to her native country. She embodies her structures with a softness, a sensitivity, and at most times a monumentality. One of her small wool sculptures may appear to be the classic geometric form of the cube; however, the way she handles her materials in this work implies the lower organs of the human body rather than geometry. Others of her small wool sculptures are much more organic in shape. One sensitively mixes two colors of natural brown wool into a ravishingly textured sculpture that also contains gaping holes that appear unsettling or even threatening. The large wool sculpture Gold Willows, 2019, that she created for her exhibition at the Fullerton Museum has different compositional and emotional at- attributes. At the end of the museum’s central hallway, it is thirteen feet in height, and seems to be split up or almost torn apart. At close range, the wool itself is made with two subtle browns, and is seductively soft and even comforting. Her second monumental wool sculpture, 2018-2019, is over nine feet high, fifteen feet long, and all in black. With its empty center rising several feet above the floor, it seems to resemble an overwhelming and extremely soft and furred seductive surface, but is potentially threatening in size and form. One final large sculpture Silver Willow, 2017, hangs in the exhibition on a wall surrounded by paintings. It combines three vertical sections of different colors of raw wool, as if composed of strange triplets. This sculpture has been constructed by Sukkarieh in a way that makes it seem like space has chewed into it, leaving only loose dead wool, yet it is still soft in materiality.

At a period in history in which art rarely addresses the most essential aspects of the mortal human experience – birth, life, joy, pain, death, space, and time – it is very important to recognize an artist who is exploring these fundamental issues – especially with works of power and subtlety. Rabbia Sukkarieh is such an artist. It is aweing how she uses the great pain and death that she had personally experienced, and that she still feels through global conflicts, to create art that combines these powerful and intense emotions with those of explosive energy and ultimate renewal.

Jay Belloli, former Founder and Director of the Armory Center-Museum, Pasadena.