Gebran Tarazi (1944-2010) was a purveyor of the counter-history of ornament. While his work most closely resembles Josef Albers in its chromatic, optical, and geometrical variation, Tarazi’s practice was grounded in artisanal work. To him, ornament was neither cosmetic, nor supplementary; it provided the basis for a vernacular language rooted in an oriental modernism, and one which was imagined by the orient itself.
Tarazi was born into a family of artisans and antique dealers in Damascus. He spent his early life in Morocco, studying at the École des Frères de Lassalle in Rabat. He moved to Lebanon with his family in 1959 and enrolled in the International College in Beirut. Following a degree in economic law that he earned from the Saint Joseph University in 1967, he worked as an antiquarian. In parallel, he pursued independent research in the fields of literature, archaeology and the crafts which shaped his approach to painting through the four decades of his artistic practice. In 1978, he wrote a novel entitled “Le Pressoir à Olives”. With the central oriental relationship between the text and the image at the forefront of his mind, he continued to juggle between the literary and visual arts. After his family business shut down in 1986, Tarazi left the city for the mountains and initiated his research in geometrical abstraction.