An Inner Light, Oussama Baalbaki at Saleh Barakat Gallery

Observe a soft face, the hard edge of a building, and a car mirror placing the viewer beside you. In Baalbaki’s work, time moves through brushstrokes, exploring a reality that is both unwieldy and familiar. Oussama Baalbaki, fully immersed in his paintings, creates an intimacy that feels believable in a world overwhelmed with images and the easily contained unreality within them. Here, there’s a place we can believe in.

Light navigates these paintings, whether through the sun’s glow, the evening pink on a building, or dark and light brushstrokes slowly revealing a face or a hand. The subjects might seem less significant than the light’s movement across them, yet the subject matters.

The landscape of the face mirrors his view. The internal world becomes external while remaining within. Born in Odeisse, South Lebanon, in 1978, Oussama Baalbaki graduated from the Lebanese University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2002. He has exhibited in group shows at the Sursock Museum in Lebanon and internationally in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, London, Miami, Munich, New York, and Washington.

His solo exhibitions include “Paintings in Black” (2004) at Dar El Nadwa, “Scenes of Isolation” (2007) at Safana Gallery, and “Less Smoke, and More…” (2009), “Rituals of Isolation” (2011), and “Pleadings of the Light” (2017) at Agial Art Gallery, as well as “Shadows of Gloominess” (2014) at Tanit Gallery in collaboration with Agial Art Gallery, “Watercolors” (2019) at Agial Art Gallery, “Pleadings of Light” (2017) at Saleh Barakat Gallery, and a group exhibition “Face and Faces” at Beit Beirut (2024). In 2009, he won the silver medal for painting at the “Jeux de la Francophonie.” Baalbaki lives and works in Beirut.