The Anatomy of a Broken Pulse (2020)

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas

Size:120x100cm

Overall Meaning

    The emotional core of these images delves into the "perpetual present" of Lebanese trauma, where the ghosts of past conflicts continue to haunt the daily lives of those who remained. It speaks to a collective state of being where the civilian body becomes a living archive of the city's scars, reflecting a grief that is not a distant memory, but a constant, vibrating background noise. This narrative rejects the idea of a "post-war" era, instead illustrating a reality where the people of Beirut must navigate a landscape of recurring instability, finding a way to preserve their humanity while their very environment remains in a state of fractured suspension.

Composition& form

     From a structural perspective, the canvases are organized around a series of frantic, overlapping systems that mimic the chaotic density of an urban center under siege. The use of target-like spirals and biomorphic, heart-like cores suggests a world where the internal organs of the people and the external infrastructure of the city have fused into a single, wounded entity. By crowding the frame and eliminating negative space, the arrangement captures the suffocating claustrophobia of a blockade, forcing the viewer to confront the "veins" and "swirls" that represent both the tangled electrical grids of Beirut and the frayed nerves of its inhabitants.

 Style

    The artistic execution adopts a fierce, neo-expressionist vocabulary that emphasizes the physical act of painting as a form of survival and resistance. A palette of "incendiary" reds and "bruised" purples clashes against deep, Mediterranean blues, creating a visual dissonance that mirrors the conflicting nature of life in a city that is simultaneously beautiful and broken. Every stroke is deliberately unrefined and gestural, moving away from cold precision to embrace a raw, hand-painted texture that honors the imperfect, weathered resilience of the Lebanese spirit.