Born around 1930, a number of Lebanese artists heirs to the academic tradition undertake, without consulting, each one on their own behalf, to reverse the function and meaning of drawing. Instead of reproducing the common visible world, drawing will now produce the private world of each of them. An invisible world of inner uncharted territories they have no inkling of. It is the complex delineation and tracing out of theirs lines and colors that will reveal them to their eyes.

By pursuing the obscure object of the desire to draw, guiding the design or guided by it, as appropriate, Laure Gorayeb and Halim Jurdak generate labyrinthine compositions and networks with multiple dimensions and connections. Huguette Caland intersects warps and wefts, tracing meshes and weaves derived through the iteration of a scarce repertory of elementary graphic signs. Yvette Achkar superimposes layers and layers of color that, through their interactions, open up unexpected relationships and unsuspected depths. Etel Adnan paints landscapes that are less faithful images than modes of perception concentrating here and now the energies and tensions of a specific moment of time. They would not have been the same one moment before or one moment after, not unlike the Zen instant drawings enriched with poems in Arabic script of her Japanese drawing books.

Such an approach was not limited to those artists, others did the same. Seen from our perspective, it is even a generational phenomenon: the times were ripe. Too many upheavals were happening in the world for them not to have had echoes, at least on a subconscious level, in the minds and hearts of ultrasensitive artists.

Here, drawing here is a complication mechanism, as they say in watch making. But instead of promoting more precision within a finite frame, this graphic machinery, contrariwise, promotes more openness, freedom and creativity to better apprehend the infinite disorder of a world gone haywire.

In 1965, Laure Ghorayeb wrote a premonitory poem in the margins of one of her first miniatures: "Truth veils its face, plagued by visions ... .Birds without wings ...  Irony dances over a beheaded corpse."

Inverting the gaze inwards through drawing without rules, in a kind of poetical writing, results in opening the doors of perception, the doors of thought, intuition, imagination and visions.

- Joseph Tarrab