Born in Lebanon in 1968, Joe Kesrouani studied architecture in Paris and learned painting and photography on his own. Now based in Beirut, he divides his time among numerous disciplines – architecture,  painting and photography. He has been exhibiting his artwork regularly since the mid 1990s. Kesrouani’s paintings and photographs represent two levels of lived experience. His dramatic, high-contrast black-and-white photographs are charged with confident sexuality, and the subjects of his portraits loom large on his prints with visceral, extroverted expressions that take patience, intimacy, and will to elicit. His paintings, on the other hand, blend abstraction and figuration to convey more introverted, complex, emotionally probing narratives. There are stories buried into the layers of paint in each of his canvases. In the construction of images, Kesrouani’s architectural training plays into both his photographs and paintings. On occasion, he brings a DJs logic into his work as well – mounting an exhibition of photographs and then, six months later, “remixing” those works in a show of paintings that draw on the original photographs for physical support and conceptual platform. Though Kesrouani is quintessentially Beiruti, his work allows no easy classification in terms of Arab or Middle Eastern representation. His work actively breaks clichés, rather than reinforcing them. As such, the world created by Kesrouani’s photographs and paintings is a world entirely of his own imagination. It is a world nearly busting its seems with pleasure and danger alike, where everything goes and nothing is exactly as it seems.