Since she started painting, the artist moved through different periods in her creativity mood, but kept the depth of live showing through her work all the way. The bright colors contrast with the quiet atmosphere and give the painting a sense of intriguing reality and perceptibility all together. Her rich repertoire of dynamic compositions, powerful expressions and vivid colors systematically seduce and disarm a public completely captured by the grace and elegance of lush and humane painting. From her subjects, lone and couples with introspective poses, contemplative and sober, impish and melancholic, to her beautifully sketched and delightfully colored still life, featuring fruits you’d try to reach for and delicately taste, or her ethnic Phoenician quilt compositions, along with landscapes of the Levant traditional villages.

Her latest work features voluptuous and yet gracious women with tranquil expressions and delicious colors. The love of subtle and tender details and “clin d’oeil” to levant specificities, her beautifully layered and intense colors, the serenity of the postures and compositions, all convey a feeling of warmth, quietude and security, soothing the eye and the soul.


Rolla Kabbouche’s Exhibition at «Le hangar de Denise» Gallery

Graduated from the Lebanese National Institute of Fine Arts, the artist renounced painting for a long time during the war, but then started back when the war ended. After a series of collective exhibitions, Rolla moved to an individual exhibition, presenting a series of mixed mediums painting featuring couples. In love, indeed.. Hugging, holding to one another on plump canapés, sitting back to back, looking eye to eye, listening to music played by an old gramophone, or lying down languidly in old fashion armchairs, in bourgeois salons with crystal chandeliers. The same “Belle époque” perfume is found in portraits of pale, romantic and sophisticated young women Rolla also paints. Grainy and dense material, harmonious colors, neat drawing underlined with a fluid color black, all constitute the signature of the lovely work of the young woman. And as pleasurable as all, are a few still-life featuring fruits, with exquisite, spirited colors.

Article published in the “Art Section” of l’Orient-Le Jour, the leading French newspaper in all the Middle-East, by Art Critic Zeina Zalzal

“The Jams”

Analysis of two of the Artist’s paintings: “The Jams” and “Under the chandelier”
Like in a floral composition, Rolla Kabbouche assembles in her painting called “the jams” products of the garden/ educing a gustative, tempting Eden. She lays before our eyes the disparate ingredients of a “douceur de vivre” that resembles our grand-mothers’; and although they do not appear in the painting, all the elements in the drawing bring them to memory, jealously watching over the secret recipe.. And it seems like the artist is giving us access to reminiscences of her childhood, stolen away from hidden memories.. In this picaresque culinary alchemy, she invites us to live a moment of unadulterated summer, to nibble at the lustrous fruits, or to surreptitiously dip a finger in the coalescent caldron of “the jams”.

By French Psychoanalyst Jean-Luc Vannier

Rolla Kabbouche at Souk al-Barghout

In he Souk al-Barghout exhibition, Rolla Kabbouche’s work stands out. Her textured portraits and still life attract quite a few amateur art collectors. All the figures in Kabbouche’s work are painted in white and are captured in relaxed poses. Their facial expressions are mostly pensive, as if daydreaming. Her figures tend to be touching, either with their hands or leaning back against one another as secretly communicating with each other. Her work is interesting primarily for its texture. Rolla uses acrylic and a secret ingredient she refused to reveal”.

Article published in the Art Section of the Daily Star, the leading English newspaper in Lebanon, written by Art Critic Nadim Mishlawi