Menart Fair

In Love & Loss, Oussamah Ghandour offers a quiet yet urgent meditation on the dualities that define our lives: presence and absence, belief and doubt, connection and solitude. These paintings do not speak in absolutes; rather, they hum with tension and tenderness, inviting us to sit with the contradictions we carry. What does it mean to hold love in one hand and loss in the other, and to continue reaching forward?

Across works created between 2017 and 2024, Ghandour’s evolving visual language speaks in elemental terms. Black ink bleeds into raw linen. Acrylic and charcoal layer like sediment, evoking both the violence and the vulnerability of emotion. The use of unprimed canvas feels deliberate, an unshielded surface for a world that often asks us to harden. Here, the artist insists on softness, on exposure, on staying open. His approach to abstraction is never detached; it is rooted in emotional expression, raw, and immediate.

The three central works of the exhibition: The Dreamer, Magnesium Oxide, and The Scattering, form a deliberate dialogue rooted in duality. The Dreamer, a striking black-and-white painting, served as the inspirational cornerstone for the entire curation, embodying a delicate balance between chaos and stillness. Magnesium Oxide responds with gestural, volatile energy, evoking chemical reactions and elemental forces. The Scattering explores fragmentation and release, inviting viewers into the ongoing process of holding on and letting go.

Ghandour’s exploration is also deeply rooted in questions of identity and the shape of memory; how it clings, morphs, and fades. This can be seen, for example, in the layering of marks that mirror the act of remembering: gestures repeated, obscured, or reworked over time. The exhibition will display accompanying digital prints which extend this inquiry into the realm of contemporary reflection, embracing the ways we archive, distort, and resurrect ourselves in the digital age.

Love & Loss is not a closed narrative. It is a space of asking, of feeling, of recognition. It reminds us that being human is to be unprimed, unfinished, unguarded, yet resilient. And in this rawness, there is always something new to discover.