Lebanese painter and classical musician Ribal Molaeb is primarily concerned with the play of air and light, his painterly attention caught by a deep observation of the sky, viewed directly from the vast panoramas that surround his home and studio in the mountains of Lebanon, the village of Baissour. Perched high on what feels like a summit, his vision is taken by the vastness of the sky, a rhythmical composition in which he seeks to describe aspects of his highly attuned aural and visual landscapes.
Molaeb’s paintings are images of movement, observations of the changing sky as it shifts from day to night, unhurried from season to season. Sweeping across the canvas, his brushstrokes at times apparent, the paint is hurried and yet delicate, capturing what is before him with the vastness of nature translated to the large scale that he has chosen.These skies are groundless, appear that way, and yet there is almost always a darker aspect towards the ground of his canvases, a reminder of earth, edge, even as it is clear this this element too is rolling, transforming with the light. Sound emerges, the memory of music grounded in a particular tradition, the complex formality, rhythmic and undulating crescendos and decrescendos of the classical form.
Ribal is a prolific worker, creating sweeping strokes of colour across large canvases depicting the sky as it shifts from light to dark and the depth of colour that he observes between. Yet, if observing the sky is his painterly passion then Ribal has another that is perhaps of equal importance. A professional musician, he has spoken of the way in which his musical interest has profoundly shaped his artistic vision, noting that his artistic focus ‘lies in the interplay and equilibrium of lines, forms, and colour gradations’, a trait that he considers influenced by his background in classical music.
The paintings of Ribal are paintings of light, but more than this they are paintings of internal space, a limitless psychological landscape that speaks to sound as well as to vision. The pace of the paintings is rhythmical, an ordered series of spaces that speak of a fluid yet ultimately tethered relationship to place and world.
Since early childhood, he had worked as an assistant to his father, the acclaimed artist Jamil Molaeb. In 2015, he founded the Molaeb Festival for Chamber Music and Fine Arts. Ribal’s paintings have been exhibited with prominent galleries and institutions in cities including New York, Tokyo, Fukuoka, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Amman, Beirut, London, Paris, Antibes, Madrid, Amsterdam, Geneva, Basel, and Zürich. Recent solo exhibitions include Artifact (New York, 2025), Mizoe Art Gallery (Fukuoka, 2025), Mizoe Art Gallery (Tokyo, 2025), Galerie Esther Woerdehoff (Geneva, 2022), and Galerie Claude Lemand (Paris, 2021). Among his participations in international art fairs, he presented a solo exhibition at Volta Basel Art Fair (2024) and Zürich Art Fair (2024), and was featured at Art Paris (2022), Contemporary Istanbul (2025), and Art Fair Asia Fukuoka (2025).
A painting by Ribal has been acquired by the Museum of Arab Art in Paris (IMA).
Currently living and working in Zürich, Switzerland, Ribal is represented by Saleh Barakat Gallery in Lebanon and Mizoe Art Gallery in Japan.
In October 2023, during the first weeks of the genocide in Gaza, Dia al-Azzawi made a series of twelve charcoal drawings called Nights of Extermination. In these works, centred on the eyes of the victims, aerial aggressions take the form of vicious birds of prey, billowing smoke and unknown objects raining from the skies, while scattered body parts are heaped in the confusion of widespread casualty and death. The innocent victims stare directly out of Azzawi’s drawings in obvious distress, entreating the viewer’s sympathy at the unfairness and hopelessness of their desperate fate.
In a 2025 daftar (or artist’s book) called Gaza: the Pain that Opened My Daughter’s Eyes, Azzawi overlays faces of innocent victims in black and white with red paint to represent both their suffering and the secondary agony of witnessing atrocities through journalism and social media, an experience of painful awakening that he observed in his own daughter, which is further signified by artist’s own handprint of testimony (also in red paint).
These recent works about Gaza can be viewed as a continuation of Azzawi’s ongoing series Land of Darkness (1991–present), which began with a set of charcoal drawings about Iraqi civilians and a diarised daftar called Book of Darkness, during the 1991 Gulf War. At the same time, they are also part of Azzawi’s continued efforts to highlight injustice against Palestinians, which can be seen in his work from the early 1970s onwards, as a symbol for the unfairness of global inequality and all corrupt political systems: this criticism is at the heart of the works displayed in the solo exhibition ‘False Witnesses’.
