When silent poetry settles on the city

“When I was a child, I had many dreams where I used to see the city. In one of those, a dome, like that of our churches, fell. When I woke up, I was overcome with worry. I was born in 1976.”

This founding dream echoes, in Maral Der Boghossian’s experience, that of the war which began in  in 1975, a year before her birth. In the mythology of her family, this experience is linked to insecurity relating to the habitat, the possible destruction of the latter, the fear of losing it, and the fact of having to leave it again to find another. This atavistic fear that weighs on her parents and threatens the family is something, she will say, that goes back further. In this, she recognizes a trauma, that of the descendants of the genocide.

However, the view of the roofs, strangely, also brings back moments of happiness. In The Poetics of Space (1957),the philosopher Gaston Bachelard analyzes the daydreams that images of happy space trigger in us, that of the house, for instance. Because home is a shelter that keeps something of our childhood. There is, indeed, in every home, the memory of the first experience of the nest and the feeling of being protected. Deep in our inner self, lives an “initial shell”, an imaginary home.

Between the anguish of loss and the happiness of the nest, the artist developed a fascination for the topographies which refer to the primary refuge that is home. She remembers that while walking from her grandmother's house to hers, she watched the sun flood the facades. In the 2000s, the subject was born. At the beginning, she said, we could only see the facades. Gradually, the skies took up more space, then the electrical wires and the roofs.

Therefore, Maral will seek to invest in the concept of the residence. She will make it her physical and psychological habitat, the place in which her practice is carried out, and her main source of inspiration. An inspiration that develops into an obsession and comes in variations. The home is the center from which the world is organized and made understandable.

In her neighborhood of Bourj Hammoud, she feels safer than on the other side of the river where the threat of destruction is omnipresent. For the moment, Bourj Hammoud’s houses, more than 60 years old, are not being destroyed. Maral feels a connection with her ancestors who settled in the region more than 80 years ago. By painting the facades of her neighborhood and its surroundings (Nabaa, Badaoui, Mar Mikhael), she marks out her comfort zone, depicts her inner house, and the feeling of security that is inherent to it.

It all starts in the sketchbooks. Maral sketches urban views that she also photographs, sometimes by stopping along a highway, in order to switch, in a second step, to the format of the canvas, add color, and simplify the drawing by flattening the perspective. She also chooses specific hours, where the facades, bathed in the afternoon’s sun, appear vibrant with light and color –blue, ocher, pink. Because Maral’s painting is also about light.  

It is within the familiarity that she developed with the work of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, the main landscape painter of the Barbizon school, that the artist discovered the beauty of afternoon light which, unlike that of the morning, secretes shadows and nuances. During her years of study, engaging in the exercise of copying “Le Pont de Mantes” (1868/70), she encountered the delicacy of grays, ocher yellows, greens with very subtle echoes, and shades of blue. As with Corot, her painting tended to idealize the landscape while trying to remain faithful to it, then sought to capture the very particular atmosphere of suburban landscapes.

Later, she discovered Edward Hopper, the painter of solitary figures and silent cities. She is confirmed in her fascination with the immediate environment. She’s not sensible to his characters, only his skies, buildings, facades, windows and, of course, his effects of shadows and lights. But none of the melancholy that impregnates Hopper's paintings is found in hers. Der Boghossian transcribes the landscapes she has on hand or within sight into luminous cities that inspire security.

In a very illustrative style where the spirit of detail, the well-drawn line and the soothing colors function as so many elements which allow the restitution of one's personal imaginary, the silent poetry of Maral Der Boghossian settles on the city.

Nayla Tamraz