About — SAÉ · Silent Art Echoes

I.Y. works as SAÉ, Silent Art Echoes, from a studio in Beirut.

Self-taught, he came to painting through writing and through his hands, and for four years has followed a single rite in his paintings: a surface is burned, left to cool, and rebuilt from its own ash with resin, gypsum and gold leaf, until a face or a form rises out of the damage. He also draws in graphite, and gives broken things a second body, recasting fragments of old statues.

His references are writers more than painters: Kafka’s locked rooms, Murakami’s wells and doubled worlds, Nietzsche’s conviction that creation begins with breaking. Beneath them runs older knowledge: the alchemists’ order of blackening before gold, the tarot’s fool stepping off the edge. Every work is titled and sealed in Nashara, a script and language of his own, so that each piece carries a name nothing else has worn.

Fire is the first hand on every painting. It takes what is weak and leaves what is true, and what it leaves, the blistered ground, the ash, the crack, is where I start. I build back into it with resin, gypsum and gold until something looks back at me: a face, a figure, a shape I didn’t know was waiting there. Where it cracks, I mark the crack in gold. The break is part of the story.

The alchemists named the first stage the blackening. Nothing reaches gold without passing through it. I think of every painting the same way: the fool who steps off the edge, the magician who makes something from the fall.

Some works arrive in dreams. Others arrive first as words, in Nashara, the language I built so that each piece could be named in a tongue no one else speaks.

The alchemists named the first stage the blackening.

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