For over seventy years, Adonis (Ali Ahmad Saïd Esber) has been recognized as the greatest living poet of the Arab world, revolutionizing Arabic poetry with a force comparable to T.S. Eliot’s influence on Western verse. This catalog presents his visual art work: drawings, collages, and mixed media pieces created since the mid-1990s that translate his poetic vision into visual form. Each work combines ink, gouache, found objects, and handwritten text in compositions that blur the line between manuscript, painting, and poetry itself.

Adonis’s visual practice mirrors his literary genius: intimate, mystical, and utterly uncompromising. Whether evoking Joseph Cornell’s assemblage boxes or channeling the Surrealists, his work invites viewers into a space where words and images merge, where emotion and intellect dance together. This beautifully produced catalog, with a foreword by curator Donatien Grau, captures the essential power of an artist for whom poetry is not just language, but a way of seeing, feeling, and being alive.