From July 16, 2025 to September 3, 2025
Galerie Tanit, Mar Mikhael, Beirut, Lebanon

Jacques Vartabedian, A Flower Out of Scale, 2025, Acrylic on Canvas, 148 cm x 120 cm
What does it mean to inhabit a space that was never meant to hold you?
What kinds of images emerge when fragments insist on being whole?
In Sorry for Interrupting, Jacques Vartabedian constructs a painted ecology of ruptures. Spaces where clouds are breached by gardens, and plants that do not coexist are made to share ground. Across two rooms, the exhibition unfolds in contradiction: large-scale scenes are interrupted by one another, while smaller works attempt to cluster, communicate, or simply hold their shape in solitude.
This fictional ecology defies botanical logic, staging improbable forms of coexistence. What emerges is not a harmonious whole, but a landscape shaped by displacement, by adaptation, and by the quiet persistence of things out of place.
The show explores how interruption can be a method of seeing. One painting cuts into another. A flower appears alone, yet not entirely isolated. Nothing remains uninterrupted; and that, perhaps, is the point.
Rooted in quiet tensions between natural order and invented logic, the work raises broader questions. Can ecological fictions reveal emotional truths? What do we inherit when we inherit fragmentation? Can a painting hold multiple incompatible realities at once?
Drawing from poetics of memory, botanical dislocation, and architectural rhythm, Vartabedian uses the traditional medium of painting to build a system that constantly undoes itself. Referencing thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard and Anna Tsing, the exhibition resists cohesion in favor of relation. Each work is a refusal to resolve, inviting the viewer to pause, move, and look again.
Jacques Vartabedian (b. 1987, Beirut) is a Lebanese-Armenian artist whose practice spans painting, installation, and collaborative formats. Drawing from lived experience, political context, and visual memory, his work constructs fragile image-worlds where interruption becomes a method of seeing. Vartabedian explores how form behaves under pressure, spatial, emotional, or historical. Often collapsing traditional structures in favour of poetic dissonance.
Across a steadily evolving body of work, Vartabedian navigates the blurred terrain between figuration and abstraction. His practice is defined by a sensitivity to fragmentation of space, of identity, of narrative. And by a recurring tension between the familiar and the unstable. Using strategies such as repetition, erasure, spatial displacement, and shifts in scale, he creates pictorial environments that are both precise and porous.
Vartabedian holds a BA and MA in Painting from the Lebanese Institute of Fine Arts. He has exhibited across the Middle East and Europe, including the BJCEM Biennale (Milan) and Art Central (Hong Kong). He is the recipient of the Saradar Foundation’s Art on Board Painting Prize (2015) and the Boghossian Foundation Painting Prize (2016).
He lives and works in Beirut.
Artists
Jacques Vartabedian
Image Gallery
Jacques Vartabedian
Flora Incompatible 1
2025
Acrylic on canvas
100 cm x 200 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
Flora Minor 15
2025
Acrylic on canvas
20 cm x 25 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
Flora Incompatible 7
2025
Acrylic on canvas
100 cm x 80 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
A Flower Rescaled 1
2025
Acrylic on canvas
50 cm x 40 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
Pyrocumulus Breach 2
2024-2025
Acrylic on canvas
100 cm x 200 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
A Flower Rescaled 4
2025
Acrylic on canvas
35 cm x 25 cm


Jacques Vartabedian
Flora Minor 11
2025
Acrylic on canvas
20 cm x 20 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
Flora Minor 13
2025
Acrylic on canvas
20 cm x 20 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
Flora Minor 18
2025
Acrylic on canvas
20 cm x 20 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
Nebulus Continuum 4
2025
Acrylic on canvas
50 cm x 45 cm

Jacques Vartabedian
Pocket Painting Flower 4
2024
Mixed media on canvas
11 cm x 10 cm
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