Lebanese artist Roula Chreim explains that between extensive traveling in her previous career, and being displaced after her house was destroyed, home has become a crucial place and idea in her life and work. Accordingly, many of her mixed-media canvases — which frequently incorporate objects found during her travels — portray homes, or inhabitants of other cultures. She paints her figures, interior scenes and cityscapes with an aesthetic that evokes both Symbolism and German Expressionism with fleeting hints of Primitivism, but retains many unique characteristics, such as a preference for rectilinear human figures, buildings and balanced compositions.
Amidst these carefully distributed images, Chreim deploys abstract markings, exquisite, thick daubs and drips of paint that contrast dramatically with the more careful figurative elements, and mysterious characters whose expressions evade any clear, definite interpretation. As a result, one gets a double-edged sense of exoticism matched with familiarity, as if returning to a home after a prolonged absence. Chreim’s paintings are just like that: strangely evocative yet thrillingly new.