Québec, la cinquième saison  (Quebec City, the Fifth Season)
Québec, la cinquième saison, 1996
(Quebec City, the Fifth Season)
Oil on canvas
Lent by the artist
(Photo: Harry Foster  © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)



"All my life, I have lived among many cultures. Syria is a country of several cultures: there are Bedouins,Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Circassians and still others. [...]

I love the blending of immigrant cultures with Canadian and Quebec cultures. In time, we shall see the birth of a new culture. [...]

Because I live, I must change. Every day, I see new things. We must change incessantly, each of us, until the end of our life."


Extracts from an interview with the artist




Born in Aleppo, Syria in 1930, Joseph Moukhtar is the son of immigrants, his parents having fled Turkey in 1916 after the massacre of the Armenians. He immigrated to Canada with his family in 1981 and has lived in Montreal since that time. I have lived among many cultures all my life. If I cannot give and if I cannot take, I cannot live, he explains.

Joseph Moukhtar
Joseph Moukhtar, Montreal, Quebec, 2000
Rawi Hage
Gelatine silver prints
Collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization


Essentially self-taught, Joseph Moukhtar began drawing and painting at a young age-for the pleasure of it, as he says. As an adolescent, he managed to prepare his own paint colours with pigments and linseed oil. Having attended evening courses for four years at a painting academy in Aleppo, he then took advantage of his encounters with other artists, notably with a specialist in stained glass, to round off his knowledge of art.

Montréal, St-Denis en hiver (Montreal, St. Denis in Winter)
Montréal, St-Denis en hiver, 1995
(Montreal, St. Denis in Winter)
Oil on canvas
Lent by the artist
(Photo: Harry Foster  © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)

The thematic orientation of his paintings has changed as he further discovers his host country: There was a time when I used to stay in my store, in the house. I would put on canvas what I saw in my mind. Now, I go out, I see many things in the city. He says that he wants to free himself from the traditional imperatives of the line and motif, to detach himself from the more conventional and nostalgic themes of his early paintings. What appears for him to be a need to blend influences, to cross and unite cultures, leads him, in particular, to recreate the poetry of Canadian urban landscapes, to make their architecture dance and undulate endlessly: I love the mix of immigrant cultures with Canadian and Quebec cultures. In time, we shall see a new culture emerge. All cultures must be blended together.

Joseph Moukhtar's work has been exhibited in Syria and in Montreal, among other places at the Syrian Cultural Centre and within the framework of the Festival du monde arabe at the Université du Québec à Montréal.