Scene V
2023
Oil and charcoal on linen
80×60 cm

Solo Exhibition:

Slumber's Tongues

2023—Solo exhibition

13—23 July 2023

Metro Al Madina, Clemenceau, Beirut

Slumber’s Tongues is the result of six months of painting. Using elaborate installation strategies, this show introduces not only the results of my labor, but also the concerns that pervaded my process.

An unorthodox system of display and circulation compels the viewer to participate in this reflection on process and image. The paintings in the exhibition can be seen only one at a time. The conventions of the white cube—paintings rubbing shoulders, sweeping overviews allowing for the immediate identification of motifs, wandering, and ‘optimal’ distance between the observer and the painted surface—are broken. Here, the image forbids distraction.The space itself hinders social interaction. You are here to look and to look at looking.

Slumber’s Tongues 21
2023
Monotype on cotton paper
25.5×23 cm

If landscape can be regarded as sublimated self-portraiture that emerges as a result of estrangement, how then can we perceive scenes displaying an amalgam of body and place: a figure emerging from or sepulchered in a nebulous vista; a growth, possibly a body parts; a rock formation; or simply a dab of paint? Looking at an image that teeters on the threshold of abstraction and figuration induces the anxiety of tightrope walking. Our eyes, like our hands, will reach for places or bodies to settle in.

—23 June 2023