LISTENING
signed in Arabic Oussama Baalbaki and dated 2012 lower right
acrylic on canvas
100 x 100cm; 39.3 x 39.3in
103 x 103.5cm; 40 1/2 x 40 3/4in (framed)

Property from a Private Collection, London

Provenance
Agial Art Gallery, Beirut, 2013

Oussama Baalbaki was born in Lebanon and graduated from Lebanese University’s School of Fine Arts in 2002. Baalbaki and his six siblings are all successful musicians and painters, following in the footsteps of their father, multitalented artist Abdul Hamid Baalbaki.

His paintings simultaneously evoke the painterly, expressive brushstrokes and dreamy colour palettes of Impressionist landscapes and the snapshots of sunsets and fireworks that populate Instagram today. This play between painting and photography is ultimately a play on time. While the photograph captures a split-second freeze-frame of a fleeting present, painting has a more fluid, flexible relationship to time.

Most of Baalbaki’s work takes on traditional subject matter, including landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits. The artist prefers self-portraiture because he considers himself his most reliable model, as he is most familiar with his own features, gestures, and emotions. Many of these self-portraits are rendered in greyscale capturing the atmosphere of his studio. At first, they appear to be charcoal or pencil drawings; upon closer inspection, however, they are acrylic on canvas, painted with the same gestural brushstrokes he brings to his landscapes. Thinning the line between realism and expressionism, Baalbaki strives to capture images of quotidian life in its emotional as well as physical forms, often imbuing his self-portraits with a sense of boredom, exhaustion, or melancholy.

Oussama Baalbaki lives and works in Beirut. His works can be found in the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut; The Mokbel Art Collection, Beirut, and The Collection of the Ministry of Culture, Beirut, Lebanon.