Une Comédie Romaine

The exhibition Une Comédie Romaine at the Maja Arte Contemporanea Gallery in the centre of Rome, presents about thirty paintings created in the last two years by the Lebanese artist Gilbert Halaby (Beirut, 1979), a few months after his debut at the Beit Beirut Museum in Lebanon with the solo exhibition Domus Berytus.

Gilbert's paintings, all set in Rome, the city where the Lebanese painter has lived and worked for many years, are populated by faceless characters, all included in the movements of the bodies and their clothes agitated by the morning air, silhouettes of pure color that stand out clearly on the canvas. In fact, the artist makes short videos with his mobile phone in the streets of the centre immortalizing some specific characters such as priests, cardinals, nuns, homeless people, but also artists, collecting a large number of slow motions; from this material of moving images, always inserted in the architectural context of the city, Gilbert selects still images, studying their different angles.

A part of Gilbert Halaby's paintings arises exactly from the collection of these videos, which is fragmented and reassembled into medium-small format canvases, in which oil colors such as blue, red, yellow, pink, black, white, emerald green shine vivid, absolute, without shades, redesigning the shapes and forms of city scenes without shadows.

Photo credits: courtesy of  Maja Arte Contemporanea Gallery official site