Written by L’Or Iman Puymartin

Oussama Baalbaki was born in Lebanon in 1978. Baalbaki and his six siblings are all successful musicians and painters, following in the footsteps of their father, multitalented artist Abdul Hamid Baalbaki. Baalbaki graduated from Lebanese University’s School of Fine Arts in 2002. 

Baalbaki’s work addresses a question that has haunted artists since the nineteenth century: what is the role of painting in the era of photography? His paintings simultaneously evoke the painterly, expressive brushstrokes and dreamy color 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. Baalbaki’s landscapes and cityscapes evoke a sense of motion, slow but insistent, that suggests the passage of time, as if to stretch a period of minutes or even hours over the canvas rather than “embalming” an instant photographically.

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, and at first 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. Still others, such as Dissatisfaction (2018) and An Exhausted Night (2018), utilize palettes of blues, pinks, and yellows similar to his virtuosic images of the sky in liminal states of dawn and dusk. 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. 

Sources

"Baalbaki, Oussama." AgialArt. Accessed September 12, 2017. http://www.agialart.com/Artist...

Ghaddar, Maryam. "When reality haunts works of art." The Daily Star. Accessed September 12, 2017. http://www.agialart.com/Conten....

Stoughton, India. "Oussama Baalbaki's disquieting dystopias." The Daily Star. Accessed September 12, 2017. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Cu... 

العراوي، ميموزا. "أسامة بعلبكي رسام الألم المرئي و المسموع في غابة السكون الكبير. Accessed October 16, 2017.    https://alarab.co.uk/أسامة-بعلبكي-رسام-الألم-المرئي-والمسموع-في-غابة-السكون-الكبير

Tarrab, Joseph. "Agial Art Gallery presents “Rituals of Isolation” by Oussama Baalbaki from May. 5- May. 21." Artofthemideastdotcom.wordpress.com. May 03, 2011. Accessed October 16, 2017. https://artofthemideastdotcom.....