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ADAI works with artists across the Middle East and North Africa to ensure their work is seen, understood, and contextualized. Representation on ADAI means supporting artists through curated visibility, research, and digital presentation, connecting their work to audiences, exhibitions, and broader cultural conversations.
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Often referred to as the era of Al-Ruwad (The Pioneers), this period marks the birth of modern Arab art. Many of these artists were sent on government-sponsored scholarships to study in European capitals like Paris and Rome. Upon returning home, they blended Western academic techniques (such as Impressionism and Realism) with local subjects, landscapes, and the emerging concept of national identity.
This period was heavily defined by regional political turmoil, most notably the 1967 Six-Day War (the Naksa or 'setback'), the Palestinian exodus, and the Lebanese Civil War. Art became a crucial tool for resistance, political commentary, and documenting human suffering. Existential angst and national trauma led to an emotionally charged, often somber, figurative expressionism.
The Hurufiyya (Letterism) movement is arguably the most significant and cohesive modernist movement to emerge from the Arab world. Artists deconstructed Arabic calligraphy, liberating the letters from their linguistic and religious functions to use them as purely abstract, rhythmic, and visual elements. This allowed them to engage with global abstract expressionism while remaining deeply rooted in Islamic and Arab heritage.
Driven by globalization, the diaspora experience, and new technologies, Arab art in this era expanded well beyond traditional painting and sculpture. It became heavily characterized by video, photography, installation, and performance art. Operating on a global stage, these artists tackle complex themes of post-colonialism, migration, memory, borders, and gender identity.
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Kalim Bechara Art Gallery is pleased to present Between Light and Memory, an exhibition that brings together the works of Robert Messarra and Marie Traboulsi Marinier, curated by Randa Sadaka, opening on Thursday, July 16, at 6 PM, in Downtown.
This exhibition marks the second chapter in Kalim Bechara Art Gallery's ongoing collaboration dedicated to the work of Robert Messarra. Following the gallery's 2025 exhibition focusing on his vibrant landscapes, Between Light and Memory expands the conversation by placing his paintings in dialogue with the contemporary practice of Marie Traboulsi Marinier. Together, their works reveal how landscape can transcend its physical reality to become an expression of memory, identity, and inner experience.
For Robert Messarra, landscape is first and foremost an encounter with light. Working predominantly with a palette knife, he transformed fields, villages, cypress trees, and Mediterranean horizons into richly textured compositions animated by luminous colour and expressive rhythm. His paintings are rooted in observation yet elevated through an intensely personal chromatic language that captures the warmth and vitality of the Mediterranean world.
Although exile shaped much of his life after leaving Lebanon during the Civil War, Messarra's work remained deeply connected to the landscapes of his homeland. His paintings convey not only the splendour of nature but also an enduring nostalgia for a lost place—one remembered through colour, light, and sensation rather than literal representation. The materiality of his painted surfaces and the intensity of his palette embody a joyful affirmation of life that persists despite displacement and personal loss.
Marie Traboulsi Marinier approaches landscape from a different perspective. Her paintings emerge through successive layers of acrylic, charcoal, graphite, and gestural mark-making that gradually reveal imagined gardens, forests, and poetic terrains. Rather than depicting specific places, she constructs emotional landscapes shaped by recollection, intuition, and lived experience.
Having also experienced exile from Lebanon, Traboulsi transforms memory into visual language. Her compositions oscillate between abstraction and figuration, where traces of vegetation, pathways, and organic forms appear and dissolve within atmospheric fields of colour. Each canvas becomes a meditation on time, silence, and the fragile persistence of memory.
Presented together, Messarra and Traboulsi establish a compelling dialogue between observation and remembrance, between the visible landscape and the interior landscape of memory. While one celebrates the radiant immediacy of Mediterranean light, the other explores the layered emotional resonance of remembered places. Their works converge through a shared sensitivity to nature—not merely as scenery, but as a repository of personal history, identity, and poetic reflection.
Curated by Randa Sadaka, Between Light and Memory invites viewers to consider landscape as both external reality and inner territory. Through colour, gesture, texture, and atmosphere, the exhibition reveals the enduring relationship between place and perception, offering a contemplative journey across landscapes shaped as much by memory as by light.
