Notting Hill VIII Painting

The consistent theme running through Ali Mourabet’s captivating paintings is their extremely vibrant color palette. With many of his works presenting simplistic geometric shapes and architectural forms and others depicting everyday life in his immediate surroundings, Mourabet is continuously seeking to explore different styles and techniques, while at the same time remaining faithful to the subjects closest to his heart. Mourabet strives to bring the same sense of peace and nostalgia to the viewer that he feels when he creates each piece. His use of saturated colours, especially in his sun-drenched faces of buildings and inviting beach scenes, give an endearing feeling of positivity. Having had a successful career as an architect, spending much of his life in Beirut where he still resides, Mourabet often paints everyday locations from the city as he observes and depicts the buildings that surround his high-rise studio and immediate surrounding environment. In more recent paintings, he has begun to combine his love for geometric forms with more descriptive elements, creating distinctive landscapes and city scapes that sit somewhere between the abstract and the figurative. Timothy Warrington of the International Confederation of Art Critics said: “Ali Mourabet is a true artist, possessing a rare ability to stimulate viewers as he conveys artistic ideas that are communicated and encapsulated as a direct consequence of an inner journey that explores the very essence of beauty through shape, colour and the essential relationship between forms. The artist’s broad and intricate cultural foundations stemming from architecture are apparent by virtue of assertive use of line and visual experimentations of mathematics, as well as the curious philosophical connections to diverse dimensions of art history ranging as wide as the Metaphysics, Optical art, Futurism, De Stijl and perspective itself.” Born in Damascus in 1951, Ali Mourabet has lived in Beirut with his family for the greater part of his life. An architect since 1976, he has a long-running passion for designing buildings, and as a professional artist since 1977, a love for depicting scenes from Lebanon, and this is reflected in much of his work.