“Love comes on various levels, and hatred is just one of them.”
Bio:
Halleh Nouri Founouni was born in 1981 in civil war torn Beirut,Lebanon, in a household where fork and knife were appropriately placed on the dinner table. She lived a life full of contradictions, with no clear boundaries between fantasy and reality.
Dropping out of high school, she left to South Wales and enrolled in a school of fine arts for a year, during which she focused on discovering, through art, the relationship between the female body’s sexual aspect and it’s procreative aspect.. Her final year project, a larger than life mural depicting the female genitalia, was censored by the department. This established her belief that sexual repression ,even in art, is evidently repressed everywhere.
Back in Beirut, Halleh spends her time working at xanadu* art space, drinking coffee, falling in love, and painting her consciousness.
Statement:
My body is my palette, I mix paint on my legs and arms. I am coated in an armor of acrylic by the end of the day, and no fancy body-wash or scented soap can make me forget the battle I survived at my attempt to win the war of love and reinventing myself accordingly.
Painting to me came as a form of therapy during teen angst years, where I used to lock myself in my room after school for hours on end. Whenever love failed me, I painted. Whenever life failed me, I painted.
I paint portraits, of myself, and the people closest to me. I don’t capture features as they would appear in a reflection of a mirror, but I do capture the feeling behind them. Exaggerating their features when I can, and according to the emotion at hand.
But none of this would have been possible if it weren’t for people I’ve come to know for years, and some for merely days. All of whom I share, or have shared intense relationships with. People influence my work to no end, my paintings sprout from this love, and reflects my constant growth and change through them, even after they’re long gone.
My brother Zeid being the backbone of my artistic spirit, I acknowledge in all my work. Without him I would’ve ended up as yet another person incapable of expressing myself and being in tune with the world around me. Without him there would be no art in my life, or any realization of the world of paint, and all it has provided me with.
My aim is to conclude beautiful relationships gone rotten, to never forget the good moments, and the bad ones. To win the battle of love, and document who I have become, along the way.
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