Alain Tasso
Alain Tasso is a French poet, painter and essayist. An autodidact, his prolific intense literary work is largely acclaimed by critics.
Biography
Tasso attended high school at the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais de Beyrouth, but refused to sit for his baccalaureate exam, and decided to study accounting instead. He remained in that field only for a few years.Grandly interested in antiquities, art objects, classical music, especially sacred baroque music, Tasso, who had started playing the piano at five, opened in 1987 "L'insolite", an art gallery. He specialized in both Art Nouveau and Oriental art, and began drawing miniatures and calligraphy. Two years later, as the violent conflicts of the Lebanese civil war ravaged the country, he was forced to shut down gallery. He worked between 1992 and 2000 as a freelancer for numerous French and Arabic magazines and daily papers in Beirut, such as L'Orient Le Jour, and published in 1993 a youth poem collection featuring a preface written by the Lebanese poet Said Akl. In 1996, Tasso was promoted Chevalier de l'Ordre Patriarcal de la Sainte Croix de Jérusalem, an eminent Oriental Catholic distinction. In 1998, he participated in a collective exhibition for the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as of following year, started teaching the postgraduate "Aesthetics" course at the Institut d'études scéniques, audiovisuelles et cinématographiques of the Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Later on, he was asked to lecture in several departments of the Faculty of Humanities at the same university, and Egon Schiele. He is also the author of several essays on "ethics" as well as on "image and power" in a dehumanized contemporary society.
His poetry, mystic at its beginnings, started out as expressionism. Later it became denser, and developed a very pure and literary style which has made Tasso a Poet of the Presence and a much noticed figure of the French poetry.
In October 2010, the publishing firm "Les éditions de la Revue Phénicienne" released an anthology entitled Alain Tasso, preceded by eleven studies and critical texts.
He started teaching in 2011 at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. He is also the author of numerous artist books.