Nabil Nahas and Nada Ghandour - Photo by Milad Ayoub © LVAA.
Nada Ghandour: We often talk about beginnings in your work. Do you remember a particular event that might have triggered your artistic sensibility?
Nabil Nahas: There were books and art objects at home, but I remember one event that, in retrospect, had significant consequences. Each holiday, my aunts gave the children in the family an envelope of money. In 1962, at the age of 12, I used mine to buy a book called Modern Painting: Contemporary Trends by Nello Ponente, and it was a revelation. It offered an overview of abstract painting in Europe and the United States. It was a Pandora’s box: a flood of images I had never seen before, which I absorbed like a sponge. On one side were Wols, Dubuffet, and Fautrier; on the other, Pollock, Rothko, and Newman—two opposing yet complementary aesthetics. At 18, I chose the New York School and set off for the United States.
Nada Ghandour: Why New York?
Nabil Nahas: Because I was far more drawn to the New York School than the Paris School, and I had come to realize that Paris had been replaced by New York as the world center of the arts. My parents agreed to send me to the United States, where I was first welcomed by my aunt Tina, who lived in New Orleans. I enrolled at Louisiana State University, and after earning my Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), I was fortunate to be admitted to the art department at Yale University, where Al Held became my mentor. I received my Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Yale in 1973.
Those years of study were deeply formative. Above all, they opened my eyes to an artistic world of unexpected richness. I discovered new approaches, new visual languages, and the freedom unique to the American scene.
Nada Ghandour: Which artists, American or otherwise, did you like?
Nabil Nahas: Among the European artists I admire are Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, Henri Michaux, and Hans Hartung. The American artists who have most impressed me are Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
When I moved to New York, I reconnected with artists I had already met at Yale—renowned figures who would sometimes spend a day with us every few months. This opened doors for me and allowed me to grow within an exceptional creative atmosphere. It was New York in the 1970s, a period of intense excitement, during which I shared the daily lives of several of these artists.
Nada Ghandour: Your work is imbued with a deep awareness of civilizations and the layers of time. Can you tell me about the experiences that connected you to this heritage and shaped your perspective?
Nabil Nahas: As a teenager, I used to go and play with my friend in the ruins of Byblos on Saturdays. A veritable mille-feuille of Neolithic, Amorite, Hyksos, Phoenician, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Mamluk, and Ottoman civilizations, the cliff revealed—through winter erosion—these different strata, and offered us countless amulets and small objects that I still keep. Everything was mixed together in a flow of earth: raw, ancient, overwhelming. This connection with such a distant past already fascinated me.
My awareness of Islamic art came later. When I was living in Cairo as a young boy, my mother would sometimes take me to Khan el-Khalili, but my real discovery of Islamic art came at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That was when I understood the formal beauty, abstract power, and spiritual depth of this art, whose influence is instinctively reflected in my work.
Nada Ghandour: How did Persian miniatures, which you sometimes mention, find their way into your work?
Nabil Nahas: What interests me about Persian miniatures is their organization of space—a distinctive pictorial space without a central vanishing point, where scenes and narratives are juxtaposed in tableaux. This concept came back to me instinctively when I began assembling different panels for my project for the Lebanese Pavilion. It explains the representation of space and narrative as a frieze of thematic scenes, a spatial approach that Matisse ultimately adopted as well.
Nada Ghandour: You often speak of the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm in your work. What do you mean by this?
Nabil Nahas: I sometimes recall an anecdote that made a deep impression on me. In the 1980s, one morning while walking on the beach in Long Island, I watched the waves wash across the sand and retreat, carving shapes and small holes. I immediately saw a connection with the constellations in the sky: my first instinctive approach to the relationship between the terrestrial and the celestial, between the macrocosm and the microcosm.
Later, after a hurricane, the beach was littered with stranded starfish. I collected a few to incorporate into my work. At first, I made monochrome paintings. Then I began working the surfaces, adding material to reveal recurring shapes. I emphasized these forms, and gradually, from one work to the next, these consistencies gave rise to what I call fractals. The patterns interlock and tessellate, much like the structures of certain crystals and organic forms—honeycombs, for example.
Nada Ghandour: Nature seems to be an important theme in your work, but that wasn’t always the case.
Nabil Nahas: Indeed, observing nature in its broadest sense has always been important to me. I think of my mother’s crystal collection and the looms in our family workshops, which undoubtedly influenced my early abstractions. Observing the ancient monuments of Baalbek also played a role. My first abstract painting, at the age of 14, was directly inspired by a fossilized fish found in Lebanese rocks.
Then, after living in the United States for 18 years, in 1993, I returned to Lebanon for a short stay for family reasons. I rediscovered the local landscape. The nature here is completely different: raw, ancient, overwhelming. I was deeply impressed by the olive trees, the cedars, and the ancient landscapes. These elements gradually became an integral part of my work. If I hadn’t returned to Lebanon, I would never have painted trees; I would have remained abstract.
That trip was a true catalyst: it marked the beginning of my regular returns to the country, where I later transformed an old family silkworm farm into a workshop and living space.
I am also deeply sensitive to what is happening around me today. The explosion at the port of Beirut profoundly affected me. I translated that pain into a series of paintings depicting thousand-year-old olive trees that I had previously transplanted into my garden.
May 4, 2026
