In Chantal Khoury’s oil paintings, a carafe does not hold—it brims, tilts, and threatens to overflow. In her solo exhibition “Monuments” at Bradley Ertaskiran (March 19 – May 2, 2026), Khoury’s brushwork moves with a rhythmic confidence that belongs to a painter thinking through her hands—unafraid of texture, of velocity, and of the visible mark. It is in this technical application that Khoury critiques the simultaneous hardening and mythologization of history, animating objects while refusing to let them solidify into mystical relics.

There is a long tradition of Western painting that renders domestic objects from SWANA as ornament—decorative and available to the gaze. Kirsten Scheid and Nada Shabout’s respective art histories of Lebanese painting demonstrate that painting from and about Lebanon has never needed Western permission to constitute its own tradition. Khoury inherits such histories and visually liquefies them, utilizing abstraction, negative space, and opacity as formal operations that force audiences to face uncomfortable histories of colonization and dispossession.

Lebanese-American artist Jalal Toufic argues that after surpassing disaster—civil war, invasion, displacement—tradition withdraws and must be actively re-summoned. Khoury’s domestic objects carry precisely this weight, but they do so while spilling and refusing to settle into the decorative quietude the genre has historically expected of them. Unmistakably reflective, Khoury’s imagery does not reconstruct a unified Lebanon; instead, her paintings gesture toward an inheritance in flux in the present tense of both paint and motion.