Sweet Dust

Saleh Barakat Gallery presents Sweet Dust, a solo exhibition by Johanne Issa, in its Upper Gallery in Clemenceau, Beirut. The show runs from 30 October to 4 December 2026, after an opening on 29 October at 5pm. It brings together eight untitled works from 2026, each made in mixed media on a panel of 50 by 39 centimetres. Seven of them show bunches of flowers, most held in a vase or a bowl. The eighth places two round orange forms against a dark green ground.

The panels share an upright format and a low, dark palette of browns, deep greens and near black. Out of these grounds the flowers emerge in red, orange, yellow, blue and pale green. The paint is laid on loosely, in short dabs, and the blooms are suggested rather than drawn in detail. In one panel, orange-red flowers sit above a sheaf of green stems. In another, blue blooms with red centres fill most of the surface. Each work is signed at the lower right.

The gallery frames the series around memory and inner life. Its text treats fragments of perception and feeling, and the traces of daily life, as the raw material of consciousness. The works, it says, turn these fragments into a psychological space shared by memory, dream, loss and resilience. It reads the colour fields as refusing illusionistic depth, so that any depth they hold is psychological rather than spatial. It also asks what remains of experience once memory thins into traces, in what it calls "the digital and posthuman era". A short statement by Issa for the show ends with a flower that is "ready to disappear at any moment".

Johanne Issa was born in 1984 and is based in Beirut. She took a bachelor's degree in cinema studies in 2005. In 2008 she completed a master's at ALBA, the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, covering visual arts, photography and video art. Her practice spans photography, painting and ceramics. The Upper Gallery occupies the ground floor of the gallery and hosts rotating displays and smaller exhibitions.