Chantal Khoury: Stay Longer

A painting can be like a memory, but only for the few moments it is being painted. Memories, despite being about the past, live only when they’re conjured in the present. So, after a painting is complete, and once the oil paint has cured, the remembering ends, and what remains on the canvas is a trace of something that has been.

In her solo exhibition, Stay Longer, Chantal Khoury’s paintings ruminate on images of kitchen tables, dining rooms, and coffee tables, all loosely set around the act of hosting others. The dishes, cups, fruits, and figurines that adorn these tables are a familiar language to her from her upbringing. A common thread across the works is the repeated appearance of these objects, which hints toward a central thesis in Khoury’s work: the things from our past that comprise who we are will never cure like a painted medium—they will only dissipate. Repeating the images over and over again is to extend their lives. To pick at the scar of something that has been is to draw life back into it, to consult it, and make sense of the present.

Khoury frequently depicts peacocks in her compositions, in large part reflecting the abundance with which the bird motif appears in ceramics and tapestries of the Levant region. The bird’s ornamental complexity echoes the abundance of the objects in the table settings. In the painting, Between Folds, a peacock stoically peers westward while its body consumes the entirety of the foreground. Khoury’s technique creates gestural lines that transform the peacock’s feathers into the intricate weaving of a tablecloth. Letting one’s eyes move across this calculated chaos reveals to a patient viewer the interwoven figural silhouettes of dancers moving in coordination, performing the Dabke. The dancers seem to appear and disappear, as though immune to coordinates. When the eye cannot rest, the figures need only to be still for us to see them move. This sense of movement and transfiguration permeates Khoury’s work, closely depicting the instability that breaks apart a memory when it is not recalled.

A similar sensibility manifests in the painting Coffee and Orange Blossoms, where three cups of coffee sit on the plane of a table drenched in nearly white, cerulean light, painted with similarly dancing strokes echoing the rhythm in the peacock’s feathers. The edges of the ceramics are nearly indiscernible, as though one’s eyes are adjusting to a new light. In this scene, the dark liquid bodies inside each coffee cup are gently pooled within this light. Despite being contained, the liquids seem to flow from one cup to another. This is a recurring element in Khoury’s work: the tendency for water to spill, to assume the shape of its vessel. Water will always want to flow down to our feet, and the four edges of her paintings gently hold the images from spilling to the floor.