Roula Béchara is a Franco-Lebanese artist born in Lebanon and currently living in Paris. She graduated in Plastic Arts from the Academy Michelangelo of Fine Arts, Beirut-Lebanon. Having started exhibiting her paintings in 1997, her works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions in Beirut, Manama, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai and Italy.

Holder of international awards, she received the Italian Artists Prize in 2016, followed by the First Prize of the Biennale di Genova Italy in 2019. She paints on large-scale canvases using two mediums, oil and acrylic. Wielding with equal talent realism and abstract subjects, she paints figures, horses and flowers in a range of colours whose fiery hues rise to the surface, creating harmonious monochromes melted with gold leaves.

At the heart of the canvas, as if emerging from a crack, appear tender flowers and noble Arab horses. Roula’s art has evolved over time to become more realistic, especially with her now famous characters, enhanced with a touch of abstract.

I was born one day in April, in a wonderful and tragic corner of the Mediterranean, Lebanon. This was my country where the incredible smell of flowers emanated, where people danced carefree under a marvellous clear blue sky, ignoring the storm that would soon overthrow everything. This storm was nothing but the infamous civil war.

My childhood and my youth were characterized by these events, by uncertainty about the future, with always this nagging question: Tomorrow will we all still be alive  This is how I learned very early on to appreciate the importance of the present moment.

It is also in this context that my art was born as well as my desire and need to paint on canvas the great and tragic mixture of events and emotions, wanting in some way to represent and transmit joy and fear, the magic and terror that has been etched in my soul.

My artistic journey began with my desire to express my feelings of revolt against war, to exalt the strength and beauty of the human being and to show the capacity of the soul to fight and to overcome the horrors generated by hatred.

I wanted to paint beauty in all its forms and colors, in all the styles I am capable of, following the path of discovery of beauty that I have observed every day since childhood.”