01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- L'Orient-Le Jour
Like Rana Hatem Slim, choose happiness
It was after the tragedy of Aug. 4, 2020, that Rana Hatem Slim began to paint. "The desire to start came to me suddenly. No doubt, to externalize the excess of emotion in which the double explosion at the port had left me," she told L'Orient-Le Jour.
Armed with her paintbrush and tubes of acrylic paint, she began by throwing onto canvas everything that spontaneously crosses her mind. The first works were dark, reflecting her mood and her vision of a devastated city. But the young woman did not want to confine herself to despair. She decided to "choose happiness nonetheless. To look for magic everywhere," she said.
Armed with a palette of bright, sunny, and luminous colors, she then plunged into an artistic practice that prioritizes positive emotions. In channeling her feelings this way, Slim not only does good for herself, but also seeks to establish a connection with others. "I am happy when, upon discovering my paintings, some people tell me they find resonances with what they are living or going through," stated the artist, who was displaying a dozen acrylics at Gemspace, a shop-gallery on Gouraud Street exclusively dedicated to promoting the works of Lebanese artists.
After participating, over the past few years, in group exhibitions "in Barcelona, Paris, Milan, and Singapore," this emerging artist — who also heads a digital communication agency — is presenting for the first time in Lebanon her works, from which emerge, as if from a vaporous field of colors, flowers, butterflies, and a thousand suns.
*Gemspace, Gemmayzeh, Gouraud Street, until August 20.
