Two Balconies and One Superstition began, quite simply, with Omar Fakhoury looking at the things around him. One balcony is his own, where his bedroom windows look onto a giant rubber tree, which he describes as a kind of living screen, shifting with the light and wind. The other is the Corniche, Beirut’s balcony onto the sea, which he walks often. Here are the palms bending in the wind, the changing sea and sunsets, and the ladders installed by swimmers on the rocks, descending straight into the Mediterranean—as though, for a moment, the whole sea were a swimming pool.
The paintings came about in much the same way. Subjects that had been quietly sitting in Fakhoury’s mind were suddenly jolted into being painted. His six-year-old daughter, sitting with him in a café one morning, asked him to draw a vacation palm tree island. Later that afternoon, walking along the Corniche in heavy wind, he saw the palms battered and blown about – recalling for him a dystopian version of the postcard-perfect image he had drawn earlier – and a series began. He ate watermelon while painting a sunset, so the watermelon found its way in too. On his balcony, he caught the Queen of the Night in bloom – a flower that opens after dark and is gone by morning. “If you miss it, you miss it,” he says. Against the suddenness of war, these small rhythms of daily life continue. As Fakhoury puts it, “War happens so fast. Painting happens slowly.” Perhaps looking becomes a little more important when things can change so quickly.
And then, one night, Fakhoury woke up laughing. It brought back an old superstition: that laughter in one’s sleep might mean a jinn is playing with you – tickling you, teasing you, or quietly meddling with your dreams and imagination while you sleep. “Borrowing the imagination,” as Fakhoury puts it, of the fourteenth-century Abd al-Hasan Al-Isfahani, author of the Kitāb al-Bulhān (Book of Wonders) and its fantastical world of strange creatures, he began to paint what would become the exhibition’s one superstition. The show has grown in this instinctive way – from a walk, a window, a flower opening at night, something eaten, something remembered, a child’s request, a dream. One thing simply leading to the next, until, together, they made a whole.