What does it mean to inhabit a space that was never  meant to hold you? What kinds of images emerge when fragments insist  on being whole?

In Sorry for Interrupting, Jacques Vartabedian constructs a painted ecology of ruptures. Spaces  where clouds are breached by gardens, and  plants that do not coexist are made to share ground. Across two rooms, the exhibition unfolds in  contradiction:  large-scale scenes  are  interrupted by  one  another, while smaller works attempt to cluster, communicate, or simply hold their shape  in solitude.

This fictional ecology defies  botanical logic,  staging improbable forms of coexistence. What  emerges is  not   a  harmonious whole, but  a  landscape shaped by displacement, by adaptation, and by the quiet persistence of things out  of place.

The show  explores how  interruption can be a method of seeing.  One painting cuts  into another. A flower appears alone,  yet  not  entirely isolated. Nothing remains uninterrupted; and that,  perhaps, is the point.

Rooted in quiet tensions between natural order and  invented logic,  the  work raises broader questions. Can ecological fictions reveal emotional truths? What do  we  inherit when we  inherit fragmentation? Can a painting hold multiple incompatible realities at once?

Drawing from   poetics of  memory, botanical dislocation, and  architectural rhythm, Vartabedian uses the traditional medium of painting to build a system that constantly undoes itself.  Referencing thinkers such  as Gaston  Bachelard and  Anna  Tsing, the  exhibition resists cohesion in favor  of relation. Each work is a refusal to resolve, inviting the viewer to pause, move,  and look again.

Jacques Vartabedian (b. 1987, Beirut) is a Lebanese-Armenian artist whose practice spans painting, installation, and collaborative formats. Drawing from lived experience, political context, and visual memory, his work constructs fragile image-worlds where interruption becomes a method of seeing. Vartabedian explores how form behaves under pressure, spatial, emotional, or historical. Often collapsing traditional structures in favour of poetic dissonance.

Across a steadily evolving body of work, Vartabedian navigates the blurred terrain between figuration and abstraction. His practice is defined by a sensitivity to fragmentation of space, of identity, of narrative. And by a recurring tension between

the familiar and the unstable. Using strategies such as repetition, erasure, spatial displacement, and shifts in scale, he creates pictorial environments that are both precise and porous.

Vartabedian holds a BA and MA in Painting from the Lebanese Institute of Fine Arts. He has exhibited across the Middle East and Europe, including the BJCEM Biennale (Milan) and Art Central (Hong Kong). He is the recipient of the Saradar Foundation’s Art on Board Painting Prize (2015) and the Boghossian Foundation Painting Prize (2016).

He lives and works in Beirut.

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