Omar Fakhoury’s most recent series of paintings and works on paper, Things and other Things result from encounters in the exercise of living. They belong to the realm of affect and world-building, extending the artist’s impulse to shift power dynamics between the big and the small, the grand and the trivial through the act of painting.
I moved houses and studios a year ago. In the boxes I found a lot of objects broken either before or while moving. I started painting them one after the other. Some other objects were broken while I was painting the other ones so I painted them too.
A broken record, a pair of sunglasses in two pieces, half an ashtray, a wrecked dildo, a smashed brush, constitute the series fragments. Carrying life by withholding memories of people and moments, this series belongs to the intimate, the biographical: an object broken by his daughter, a relic from his father or a remnant of a past time. These everything but dead- object paintings - can one say living-object in opposition to this? – are the manifestation of affect in what they represent and in the act of painting them itself. They are like forensic photography-type images of an act of living in progress.