The Courage To Be II: Henry Jabbour

A former medical scientist who spent years in laboratory precision before abandoning it entirely for painting in 2010, he brings to his canvases what science perhaps never could accommodate: the gloriously unresolvable mess of human feeling. His new show at Pontone Gallery makes a compelling case that this was always what he was meant to be doing.

The paintings are immediately, almost aggressively beautiful. Jabbour is first and foremost a colourist, and he deploys his palette with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what saturated, iridescent hues do to the nervous system. These are not quiet pictures. Deep blues wrestle with burning oranges and sharp yellows across surfaces built up in thick, physical slabs of oil — applied by brush, knife and intuition in equal measure. The paint itself is a subject, and the sheer material exuberance of it communicates something before you’ve even registered what you’re looking at.

Your Dream In Mine II, 2025

What you’re looking at, when you do settle in, are people. Sometimes alone, more often in pairs or small clusters — holding, turning towards each other, caught in the suspended grammar of intimacy. Jabbour doesn’t give yom, u faces in any legible sense. His figures are vestigial, almost spectral, conjured from colour and gesture rather than drawn outline. And yet the emotional content is entirely legible. You know, without being told, whether these people are in love, in grief, or simply in the uncanny presence of another human being.

The settings carry their own weight. Something in the warm light and loose, horizoned landscapes suggests the Mediterranean — appropriate given Jabbour’s Beirut origins — but this is not reportage. It’s a constructed space, almost Edenic, where the ordinary pressures of the world don’t quite reach. That utopian quality could tip into sentimentality, but Jabbour’s restless, conflicted surface energy keeps everything honest, yet hopeful.