Lebanese painter and classical musician Ribal Molaeb is primarily concerned with the play of air and light, his painterly attention caught by a deep observation of the sky, viewed directly from the vast panoramas that surround his home and studio in the mountains of Lebanon, the village of Baissour. Perched high on what feels like a summit, his vision is taken by the vastness of the sky, a rhythmical composition in which he seeks to describe aspects of his highly attuned aural and visual landscapes.
Molaeb’s paintings are images of movement, observations of the changing sky as it shifts from day to night, unhurried from season to season. Sweeping across the canvas, his brushstrokes at times apparent, the paint is hurried and yet delicate, capturing what is before him with the vastness of nature translated to the large scale that he has chosen.
These skies are groundless, appear that way, and yet there is almost always a darker aspect towards the ground of his canvases, a reminder of earth, edge, even as it is clear this this element too is rolling, transforming with the light. Sound emerges, the memory of music grounded in a particular tradition, the complex formality, rhythmic and undulating crescendos and decrescendos of the classical form.
Molaeb is a prolific worker, creating sweeping strokes of colour across large canvases depicting the sky as it shifts from light to dark and the depth of colour that he observes between. Yet, if observing the sky is his painterly passion then Ribal has another that is perhaps of equal importance. A professional musician, he has spoken of the way in which his musical interest
The paintings of Ribal are paintings of light, but more than this they are paintings of internal space, a limitless psychological landscape that speaks to sound as well as to vision. The pace of the paintings is rhythmical, an ordered series of spaces that speak of a fluid yet ultimately tethered relationship to place and world.
Becoming Light View Catalogue
