A pianist who found refuge in paint.

Habib “Bibo” Khoury is self-taught. Alongside a life at the piano, he found in painting a second language, one that could hold what music couldn’t say.

Encouraged by his friends Bernado Gouthier and Nicola Rosini di Santi, he began to paint in earnest, and never stopped. His work moves between two instincts that seem opposed but come from the same hand: the exuberance of colour and the deep silence of black.

Three series

The colour works are loud and joyful: bricks, grids and letters of pure pigment. The black works belong to a different register entirely: outrenoir, beyond black, where the only light in the painting is the light the surface itself catches in its ridges. The newest works, Figures, bring faces, crowns and scrawled words onto the canvas.

Every canvas is one of a kind.