Part I_Chapter 1_Section 79: Walid Sadek’s Love Is Blind (Modern Art Oxford, UK, 2006):

In 2006, the artist, writer, and prfessor Walid Sadek produced and exhibited his Love Is Blind in Suzanne Cotter’s Out of Beirut in Modern Art (Oxford, U.K.).
Walid’s work consisted of ten framed captions, ten paintings by Mustafa Farroukh, and ten texts displayed on two facing walls, each containing five captions, paintings, and texts. The walls were painted white, and were around 4 meters hihg, 6 meters long and 50 cm. wide each.
The captions consisted of printed labels mounted behind a plexiglass plate. Each plate measured around 10 X 15 cm. All captions included the name Mustafa Farroukh in Arabic and English as well as Farroukh’s dates of birth and death in parantheses. Each caption also included some information in Arabic and English about the displayed Farroukh paintings: title; date; medium; dimensions; collection; wheter the work is signed or not as well as the position of the artist’s signature on the back of the work; other notations by Farroukh on the back of the work.
The displayed texts were in Arabic and English and were positioned above and below the captions. The content of the texts was more or less the same, made available in the two languages. The text ranged in lengths from seventeen to sixty-five words in English, and eleven to fifty-seven words in Arabic. The texts were left-justified, and appeared to have been silkscreened in black matte paint on the wall, with a 12 point Sans Serif font used for the English text, and a 10 point unkown font for the Arbaic. The text in Arabic was placed less than 1 cm. above its accompanying caption. The text in English was placed around 5 cm. below. The word „name“ and/or it plural „names“ appear at least once in eight of the tent texts.
The captions and texts were separated by a white space that approximated the dimensions of the Farroukh work referenced in the captions.
In 2008, I asked Walid to lend his Love Is Blind to this exhibition. Walid hesitated, refused, hesitated again, and then agreed.
In a conversation in April 2008, we agreed that Walid’s work will not be displayed. During our conversatiion, Walid expressed his adminration of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning artwork produced in 1953. I concurred.
In July 2008, I asked a number of individuals to recommend good tromp l'oeil painters. The artist and professor Mhammed Rawas recommended the painter Rita Adiamy, among others. I commissioned Rita to paint on the gallery walls a reproduction of Love Is Blind as it appreared in an installation shot that Walid forwarded me.