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'The happy alliance of the ceramicist couple Marie and Gérard Khoury with the painter Abboud means that, in the very heart of Paris, in the Marais, the seeker after novelty in that realm will find himself, according to his whim, projected into a kind of unexpected planetarium. Because, just as when the visible stars shine under light gauze on a winter night when the stars prick you icily, we enter into a comparable world, where we want to see those pale blue dishes turn again under their enameled icing. Their diameters, from 40 to 70 cm, posed a manufacturing problem, since the ceramist wanted to intermingle the grain with the smooth. To achieve this, meant a combination of clay and Vallauris earth. Abboud's décor, placed directly onto the ceramicist-potter's achievement, without any emphatic use of colour, remains discreet, in the varying shades of pale blue made from cobalt mineral salts. It can be read, according to the eye's flight or that of imagination - as a sailor lost at sea or a mermaid "as you like it" - or as a bird taken form a Persian fairytale, a warrior bearing his shield, or a still life of those pistachioed cakes found only in Levantine countries, or more simply, the arabesque of a decorative effect. It remains that these works, where artisanship is linked to art, remain totally functional: all the earth's fruits could be placed in these platters and these foodstuffs would be more than happy, all the more so as the attentive maidservant need not worry about dropping these offerings since the ceramicist has thought of the fact that her fingers will be lodged in an appropriate opening on the dish's edge. Are we in the Middle East or in Nevers during the seventeenth century? More simply, we are travelling through Gérard Khoury's planet, as well as the fragment of the Milky Way cut up by Marie Khoury, where the painter Abboud has let his imagination filled with the abstract imagination of oriental legends fly off.' (Pierre Granville, in C. Lemand (ed.), Shafic Abboud, Paris, 2006, p. 25).