Ziad Dalloul (b. 1953, Soueida, Syria) is a French-Syrian painter who has been based in Paris since the 1980s. His work does not dwell on landscape as subject, but on its deeper conditions. “I discuss with nature,” he notes - an exchange through which art seeks to grasp what remains elusive: its enigma, its mystery, and that which cannot be seen.

Working across oil painting, etching, drawing, and artist books, Dalloul constructs spaces where human presence is both evoked and withheld. Beds, tables, and chairs - often the only man-made elements in his compositions - appear quietly embedded within their surroundings. So seamlessly integrated, they seem almost natural, as though they have always belonged. In this way, they suggest the human without depicting it directly, pointing instead to an enduring, inseparable bond with nature.

In Dalloul’s work, nature unfolds as an interior - a room, a place of dwelling. Curtains frequently appear as thresholds, mediating between the visible and the invisible, and dissolving the boundary between inside and outside. These are not landscapes to be observed from a distance, but spaces to be inhabited. Light moves freely and unpredictably: what is near may feel distant, and scale shifts according to a logic the artist describes as deliberately “illogical,” yet rendered with complete conviction.

Underlying this sensibility is a persistent meditation on time and existence. To question nature is, for Dalloul, to confront human ephemerality against the vast continuity of the universe. A recurring concept in his work, Le repos des choses (“The Rest of Things”), resists the notion of stillness implied by “still life.” Nothing, for Dalloul, is ever truly at rest. Through the constant movement of light, objects remain alive. Light is not merely descriptive - it is the very condition through which vision, and thus existence, becomes possible.

Dalloul studied printmaking at the Beaux-Arts in Damascus before continuing his training at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where he has lived ever since. He also spent four years in Algeria from 1977, where he developed an arts programme. His work is held in major institutional and private collections, including the British Museum, London; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Atassi Foundation, Dubai; the Al Mansouria Foundation, Jeddah; and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, among others.