I. paintings & drawings — christian sleiman

blue hour

group show at taymour grahne projects
online
june, july 2026

Christian Sleiman’s whimsical paintings, fruit bowl (pool), just jump and pool brunch rendered in acrylics and oil pastels, present vividly bizarre scenarios. This is partly due to the persona adopted by the artist when creating them, Sleiman explaining “These pieces emerge from my painting practice through the persona of a pirate - a traveler who drifts through ever-changing landscapes, meeting different creatures along the way”. The effect is joyously strange - in eye-popping colour, we encounter giant fruits sunbathing, beasts, ducks and swans cavorting, splashing, reclining and diving..

i followed the sun
We landed on a mirage

solo show at valentin 61
lausanne, switzerland
april, june 2026

For the past few years, Christian has been moving like a pirate. "I carry canvas wherever I go, painting on tables, walls, or any surface I can temporarily claim. I don't fully belong to one place anymore."

The sun and bodies of water became his compass. The people he met along the way became his anchor.

His ship has stopped in Lausanne; after Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey. This exhibition traces that journey through the first quarter of 2026, the period when the world began to look different.

The sun, he noticed, was growing angry.
The way humans were moving through the world, through ecosystems, through each other, was a slow destruction.
He watched it the way you watch a fire from a distance;
close enough to feel the heat, too far to do anything but bear witness.

What you witness long enough, you eventually become.
He is still following the sun.
Still landing on the mirage.

pyre, ash. after.

group show at art affair
beirut, lebanon
december 2025

She had a face, the Sun.
She had always watched.

She had watched every empire rise and crumble,
she would watch this one too.

But this time the wound ran deeper.
The balance had been broken not by war or drought, but by forgetting.

By the slow, creeping amnesia of a creature that had stopped believing it belonged to something larger than itself.

So she made a decision.

She gave her fire to every creature that had witnessed the malice of humans,
the ones that remembered what the world had been.

And she told them: erase it.
Not out of hatred, but out of necessity.

The way a physician burns a wound to save the body.
The way the forest floor must char before anything new can breathe.

The children were spared.

They were raised by the animals, by the rivers, by the slow patience of trees.

The hope was this: that they might grow into something the old world never managed to become;
grateful, humble, awake.

In the ash and the silence, what had always been true became impossible to ignore.

Some things must be destroyed completely before they can become something else.