Through his woodcuts, Molaeb watches his familiar world with obvious affection and active sympathy, a world threatened by war, rampant globalization, mechanization, information technologies, real estate and financial speculation, in order to perpetuate its memory through a graphic approach imbued with hieraticism and sometimes solemnity which ennobles and idealizes even the minor aspects of peasant life.
A life where men, women and children are constantly accompanied, helped, or watched by pets and wild animals whose behavior often allegorically evokes the Lebanese internecine war and its aftermath which were in full swing when most of the prints were being engraved and edited in only two or three copies by the artist himself between 1980 and 1984.
His obvious ambition, from so a particularistic fulcrum, was to universally embrace, with a gaze at once empathetic and critical, all areas of nature and culture: emptiness and fullness (which he brilliantly plays against each other in his relief woodcuts since 1980), cosmos and stone, day and night, sea and mountain, rural life and urban life, private life and public life, war and peace, wisdom and folly, tradition and modernity, veil and nudity, myth and reality, History and the latest news. And, of course, men, women, children, animals, and plants.
Unwilling to stay idle, he undertook the creation of most of his woodcuts on makeshift wood matrices, pine logs, door leaves, and other reclaimed wood. He had to prepare and engrave those using improvised tools, chisels, knives,screwdrivers, and anything fit for cutting, gouging, and hollowing out. Without a printing press at hand, even a tinkered one, he took on himself to coat, not with ink but with black oil-painting, limited portions of the surface of those large format woodcuts (50 x 70 cm, sometimes more), then to lay a sufficiently thick sheet of paper and press it down with all his might, using a roller of only five centimeters in length.
Polychrome woodcuts dated 1991, 1993, and 2013 are resumptions of the woodcuts of the 80s, with rare exceptions. They are drawn by the same method, each oil color being spread over a small portion of the relief woodcut, sometimes several times to ensure the desired saturation, a work even harder and more delicate than with black and white. Those proofs, like the engravings themselves, are thus a highly unusual production, out of character in the world of woodcut techniques and procedures, where appropriate wood boards and professional presses are used.
The woodcut, by the nature of its medium, its instruments, and the hollowing out procedure along the wood grain, is ideally suited to the rustic character of Molaeb's world. It requires powerful jerky gestures, abrupt cuts, and concise angular synthetic outlines of an almost awkward simplicity: the more summary, so much the more potent. Only thus the desired hieratic effect is achieved.
Woodcutting is for Molaeb a kind of emotional release, of externalized rage, and of physical and creative energy expenditure. Molaeb proffers a range of works imbued by the nostalgia and hope of a quiet convivial life, a life worth living, despite the bellicose mood of the times.
Excerpts from the book: "Jamil Molaeb - Xylographies/Woodcuts" by Joseph Tarrab.