Agial Art Gallery invites you to the opening of Vanessa Gemayel's exhibition “Other Worlds…” on Thursday 8 June at 5:00-8:00pm.

The paintings of Vanessa Gemayel are visual representations of her auditory world, electronic music that is emotionally resonant, full of distortion and familiarity. Her paintings are a direct and unmediated ekphrasis, a movement or description between one artistic form and another, auditory to visual, sound to painting. While clearly informed by sound, Gemayel’s paintings equally exist on their own visual terms, transforming their source and making of it a visual sense, relatable for a world of tangible things. In this world, colour, shape and line, distance and depth, are delineated by the boundaries and possibilities of the visual world. Yet, Gemayel retains a connection to the freedom of sound, its spatial wandering.  

Vanessa Gemayel is a Lebanese American painter, writer, and DJ. She was born in Paris in 1985 and is currently based in Beirut. Gemayel has 6 solo exhibitions to her name, her first taking place at Artlab in 2013. She has participated in numerous group shows. One of her works appears in the J. D. Jacquemond collection at the Anatole Jakovsky Museum in Nice. Her work appeared at the Outsider Art Biennale in Lyon, 2011’s New Talents, International Art Exhibition by Artists of the Lebanese Diaspora. In 2009 Gemayel’s art was displayed at the city/country that was often the subject of her work; Lebanon’s Salon d'Automne. In 2021, her most recent piece of writing “La chanteuse bleue” was published in the book “Le Cirque”, featured alongside the drawings of Dominique le Tricoteur.

Gemayel paints with direct intensity. Her work captures Lebanon’s urban landscape and all the different textures and colours which inhabit it. Art historian Jean-Dominique Jacquemond has described Gemayel’s colouration as ‘luminous’. The artist paints in the composite perspective; compiling several 1st person perspectives onto one image and tackling the simultaneous flatness and depth of the medium of painting