Until 7 November 2025, Ayyam Gallery is hosting Inside Out ’25, a solo exhibition by Syrian artist Elias Izoli. It marks his return with a striking new body of work that reimagines the metaphor of the circus as a stage for the human condition. After several years away from painting, the artist revisits his practice with renewed emotional intensity and explores the delicate balance between spectacle and struggle, illusion and reality.
Acrobats, clowns, and tightrope-walkers populate his canvases. Their fragile gestures and suspended movements echo the precariousness of existence in times of uncertainty and displacement. Behind the bright costumes and the glow of the limelight, Izoli’s figures reveal subtle traces of fatigue, fear, and resilience, turning the circus ring into a mirror of life’s contradictions, where survival itself becomes a performance.
Rendered in his signature style, the works combine acrylic paint and collage, their layered surfaces suggesting fragmentation and reconstruction. Muted tones contrast with vivid bursts of colour, while Izoli’s use of texture and space creates a sense of quiet psychological tension. The visual rhythm of balance and imbalance, motion and stillness, evokes the emotional strain of those living on the edge of chaos, navigating between visibility and vulnerability.
Through this new series, Izoli continues to build on the themes that have long defined his work: empathy, melancholy, and the quiet dignity of ordinary people. At the same time, he expands his visual vocabulary into a more theatrical and introspective realm. The artist’s personal reflections are transformed into a collective metaphor, a meditation on balance, endurance, and the beauty of being human.
About the artist
Elias Izoli (b. 1976, Damascus, Syria) is a self-taught painter based in Damascus, whose practice explores identity and survival in the context of Syria’s shifting social and political realities. His early works often depicted children and intimate scenes of daily life, rendered with a muted palette and a deep sensitivity to human emotion. Deeply influenced by the modernist painter Louay Kayyali, Izoli’s art shares a similar commitment to sincerity and restraint, yet speaks in a distinctly contemporary voice.
Since 1993, Izoli has displayed his work in various exhibitions, including Art Dubai 2025 and several solo shows at Ayyam Gallery in Beirut and Dubai (2010, 2012, 2013, 2016, and 2018). His art pieces are part of the Samawi Family Collection (Dubai).
To get more information about Inside Out ‘25, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in visiting Refined Compositions by Ruba Salameh, The Only Way Out Is Through: The Twentieth Line, and The Imaginary Museum.
