Juliana SERAPHIM

The painter Juliana Seraphim has divided her professional career between Lebanon and the great capitals of Europe. On three occasions she was chosen by the government of Lebanon to represent her country, at the Biennale of Paris, the Biennale of Alexandria and the Biennale of Sao Paulo. French, Italian and Spanish scholarships gave her the opportunity for pursuing advanced studies in the following academies:
    She was awarded several distinctions, namely:
-The Florence Prize.
-The Prize of the Ministry of National Education, Lebanon.
-The second Prize for Foreigners at the City of Viarregio.
     As a painter of fantastic Art, Juliana Seraphim appears in the Anthologie du fantastique of the Revue Planète and several works of considerable rarity. In 1971 she completed twenty-seven engravings on copper for Shorewood Publishers of New York, plates which illustrated nine winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasanuri Kawabata, St. John Perse, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Erik-Axel Karlfeldt and Miguel Asturias. It is a strictly limited edition. As painter, draughtswoman and engraver, Juliana Seraphim played a role in the great movement of the parallel arts including poster design. Her works were chosen by the French publishing company Mic-Mac for printing in color, after which they were circulated around the world.

     The ORTF (official French Radio-Television) devoted a 40-minute film with commentary to Juliana Seraphim, which was shown in forty-five francophone countries around the world.

     "This artist whose talent is well known and accepted in Europe, particularly in Paris, expresses herself through two themes: first through architecture of fabled wonder, beset with slender towers, spires and rhythmic arcs, all flaming with gold and different materials, and then through fantastic forms of the flower woman, in which are allied in complete ambiguity both the human form and the richness of the vegetable universe. One may perceive through this art a rare personality, creating a strange atmosphere born of the deepest subconscious. Here we find a spontaneous surrealism owing nothing to the traditional rites and lexicon of the surrealist school. The multiple mutations of forms and of beings are born, then flow, and then either merge again or affirm themselves in an almost biological dynamism. The meticulous execution, supple, elegant, charming at times, with tones that are ravishing and rich, release a perfume of delicately pungent eroticism, of subtle cruelty. This inspiration, physical, mental, psychic, has an alluring and troubling sorcery. It seduces us the better to overwhelm us, to plunge deep within us and to disturb us, and then it transports us into a mysterious paradise, polyvalent and multiform, into a sublimation of the thousand pulsations of the soul, of the heart and of the senses.
     Oriental Artist, Juliana Seraphim retains the specific characteristics and spirituality of her origins. There we find a deep poetry in the inspiration, whether literary or plastic, of tradition. A transposition of what is real into an imaginery world of fantasy dominates artistic creation. External appearance keeps its qualities of elegance, giving pleasure to the senses and above all joy to the eye. Light and colour play a leading role as line and script weave a fabric both distributive and suggestive, while the whole work lends itself to a rich play of symbolism and adventitious signification. Behold then an achievement which reveals to us an artistic conception which is both original and a source of enrichment for the West".
     Robert Vinat - Ex-President of the Association of Art Critics of France