Look, a soft face, the building’s hard edge, a car mirror situating the viewer beside you. In the work of Baalbaki movement in time is expressed in the strokes of the brush, and the reality that is explored in his paintings is unwieldy, yet somehow familiar.

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.

The landscape of the face becomes the landscape of his view. The internal world becomes external while remaining within. 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.

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 hosted in collaboration with Agial Art Gallery, Watercolors (2019) at Agial Art Gallery, Pleadings of Light (2017) at Saleh Barakat Gallery, 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.