EXHIBITIONS
Oussama Baalbaki is an artist who is situated fully within his paintings, providing an intimacy with his world that we can somehow believe. In a world saturated with images, with the knowledge of the unreal that can be easily contained within that image, we find a place here that perhaps we can also believe.
Light is a way around these paintings, whether in the glow of the sun, the play of the evening pink on the side of a building, or felt within the close building up of dark and light brushstrokes slowly illuminating the side of a face, the turn of a hand. From the perspective of light, the subjects are perhaps less significant than the movement of that light that passes across and through them. And yet, the subject does make a difference. expression of the feeling of contact, intimacy, desire.
The landscape of the face becomes the landscape of his view. The internal world becomes external while remaining within.
For the painters and poets, Laura J. Braverman, Amy Todman and Afaf Zurayk, of Faith in the Forming painting and poetry share an equal weight, though not a weight that can be measured on a scale. Rather the balance is one of knowing what is already there, what is coming from within. A word can be placed beside every painting, but this is hardly the point. Rather, for some, the painting or poem might arrive alongside its neighbour, might suggest itself perplexedly. Indeed, the relationship of the poem to the painting may be unclear, perhaps must remain a little unknown, because the painting and the word, though related, reach toward singular spaces, both of which continue to unfold alongside one another.
Water doesn’t own a visual texture. It is deceitful. It borrows the texture of surrounding things
to create an illusion. I know that its texture is illusory, and for that reason I was drawn to it.
The Illusion of Worlds takes the viewer on a journey to escape the world we know, and through that passage leads us towards another. This is not a simple journey out of the city, though it is that too. It is equally something more, a personal memento of how to live right now, here, and in this time.
Rim El Jundi is a city girl, self-proclaimed, a hybrid. She paints life as it passes, and her life is here, or there, or on the way somewhere else, always in Lebanon, even if affected by thoughts of escape, migration, movement. Now, she paints a small parcel of land, an enclave of safety in the village of Aamchit, her cocoon. This world centres on a swimming pool, is caught in neat, hot, slices of blue. There is no wider world.
Here, El Jundi writes, I can place my hand on the illusory texture of water.