Lea Helou

Lea Helou is a promising Lebanese artist who has emerged onto the national art scene in recent years. She studied at the Lebanese University, where she obtained a BA in Fine Arts.

Helou has documented the extensive research process she undertook in her search for an artistic identity she felt to be authentic, explaining how she experimented and tried out different ideas across the spectrum on her journey. She describes identifying a process of painting that she feels is not only deeply personal, but also genuine and one that she can see evolving over time, with sustainability at its heart. Commenting on her practice, Helou has said her paintings represent her own reality, describing them as “an ongoing, endless project about where and who I’ve been at different points in time, all at the same point in space: home. It’s a timeline, or a visual diary with multiple entries.”

Helou’s work has featured in key group shows organised by Arneli Art Gallery, Beirut, among others. These include a show titled ‘Parallel Realms’ (2022), a collaborative collective with Zico House and curated by Manar Ali Hassan, in which artworks were presented expressing complex feelings and ideas allegorically through shapes and colours, linking us to our body, society and environment.

Her work also featured in Arneli’s participation at the 22nd International Art Exchange Exhibition in Japan (2021), hosted by the Japanese, Asian, Latin American Artists’ Association and Yokohama Arts Foundation, and held at the Civic Art Gallery in Kanagawa. Helou chose an acrylic on canvas artwork for this project titled ‘June twenty-first, 11:26 am’, created at the height of the Covid-19 global pandemic. The work instils an acute sense of solitude, which serves as a stark reminder of the sense of confinement that so many of us felt during the health crisis, created from the contrasting juxtaposition of an interior which is empty, yet seemingly also almost suffocating, and a large window reminding us of the existence of an outside world. The work is devoid of any human presence, yet we ourselves feel as if we are the protagonists, imprisoned in that dark, sombre space and able to view, but not access the world beyond the panes of glass. Other artworks by Helou also have months, dates and times as their titles (‘July twenty-fifth, 10:28am’ and ‘August Eighteenth, 11.29am’), pointing to the impact that specific moments in time have as a source of inspiration to her process as an artist.