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.

Oussama Baalbaki was born in the village of Odeisse in the South of Lebanon in 1978. He graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University in 2002. He has participated in group exhibitions in numerous institutions, including the Sursock Museum in Lebanon, as well as abroad, in the cities of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, London, Miami, Munich, New York, and Washington.

The exhibition runs from 20 June till 20 July 2024 at Saleh Barakat Gallery, do not miss it.