Henry Jabbour | The Courage to Be II

Pontone Gallery is excited to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Henry Jabbour. This sequence focusses on the figure, sometimes solitary, but often paired and grouped to express tender interaction and emotional engagement. As ever, his distinctive trademark is the use of vivid, coruscating colour. These pictures are steeped in saturated hues of iridescent dragonfly blues, brilliant buttercup yellows and vibrant tangerine oranges. The paint is applied in thick slicks and creamy coagulations of viscose oil.

Jabbour’s protagonists are rendered as vestigial images, clouded and ethereal, suffused with colour and light. They are located in fields of turbid paint that evoke dramatic landscapes - suitably agitated backgrounds sympathetic to their expressive content. The figures interact, gesture, hold and regard each other so as to imply significant relationships and emotional bonds. The gestural working of the painter’s brush and palette knife make a highly charged surface that reiterates the emotional intensity of the subject.

The warm hues, schematic horizons and brightly lit nature of the encompassing landscapes hint at something Mediterranean, where a hot sun nurtures the artist’s characters. This is an aspirational, Utopian setting for Jabbour’s voyagers, a dreamlike space in which to meet their hopes and fears, a notional cradle of spiritual uplift and resolution, which acts in glittering contrast to the prosaic everyday world.

There are other studies in this show of flowers and fragments of landscape that celebrate an uninhibited joy in the manipulation of paint, but the general thrust of this body of work is to depict the human condition as Jabbour perceives it. His tender compositions of fragile humanity in turn isolated, pensive, yearning, perhaps in love - perhaps not, portray a human spirit in flux and uncertainty, but always in hope.