Itinéraire (رحلات مدن)

Galerie Janine Rubeiz opens its autumn season with "Itinéraire" (in Arabic, "رحلات مدن", journeys of cities), a solo exhibition by the Lebanese painter Jamil Molaeb. The show opened with a reception in the artist's presence on Wednesday 23 September 2026, from 5pm to 8pm, and remains on view in Raouche until 30 October 2026.

The exhibition gathers some fifty cities seen through Molaeb's eyes. An avid traveller for more than five decades, he has moved between Shanghai and Beirut by way of Japan, the Americas, Europe, North Africa and the Arab world. However far he goes, the gallery notes, "Beirut and Lebanon remain both his starting point and his ultimate destination", anchoring the journey and shaping the way he looks.

Molaeb absorbs the energy of each place he visits, observing its details, rhythms and particular character, and then carries those impressions directly into paint. In the gallery's words he becomes "both a witness to and an interpreter of the cities he discovers", building "a pictorial memory of the world, artwork by artwork". For Molaeb, sharing what he finds is part of the process itself: the journey does not end with personal experience but continues in what he passes on to the viewer.

The exhibition extends one of the longest artist and gallery relationships in Beirut. Molaeb first showed at Dar El Fan, the cultural centre founded by Janine Rubeiz, in 1972 and 1974, and has since held some twenty exhibitions with the gallery, from "Gouache" in 1994 to "New York, New York, 1984 to 2015" in 2016, "Jerusalem" in 2018 and "Jamilat" in 2024.

"Itinéraire" invites visitors to travel from city to city through painting, and to let these discoveries, as the gallery puts it, "inspire you to dream, travel, and see the world in a new light". It is a chance to see a senior figure of Lebanese modern painting turn his long practice of looking towards the wider world, while keeping Beirut at its centre.