In the last year El Hussein has moved from the small scale to the large, from the solitude of an everyday life of coffee cups, trees and discarded strappy sandals, to a sensual garden union, a love story lived outside. It is her garden, we imagine, under her own sky. Something is underneath, a foot is being laced into a transparent shoe, the layers of a story playfully constructed. Two tongues twist together.

This should be a portrait of erotic play, yet somehow it is not. These tongues are without mouths, faces, detached from themselves in finding of each other. In fact, this artist seems most attracted to the interplay of objects, the way a tongue can look as it moves against another, more than the expression of the feeling of contact, intimacy, desire. Rola El Hussein was born in 1978 and graduated from the Lebanese University of Fine Arts in 2002. She lived and worked for many years in other countries before returning three years ago to Lebanon, to concentrate on her developing painting practice. Always having the tendency to draw the objects that she chose to surround herself with, she slowly began to understand the connection between that intimacy and her introverted personality.

This most recent exhibition, her second solo show, reflects a more sarcastic side to her character, highlighting a freedom and a daring sensitivity that allows her to play freely with anatomy alongside the other objects that make up her surroundings. There is throughout, a layered approach to her handling of materials, a transparency that revels in the playful possibilities of canvas, paper, paint, colour and line. Rola is also a novelist and poet, and has published two novels and four poetry collections, the last ‘The Planet of Short Times’ published in 2023 by Dar Al Nahda Al Arabia. She also writes regularly for several websites.