BEIRUT: It may sound like a bit of a cliche to depict Italians as a people fond of gesturing with their hands, but it is a relevant generalization for Italian artist Arcangelo (Arcangelo Esposito to his mother).The artist told The Daily Star that he uses his hands to apply the mixed media (paint, charcoal, chalk and pastels) to his canvases. He does so, he says, to have “direct contact with the work.”

Arcangelo is exhibiting 12 drawings and 18 mixed-media paintings in “Beirut,” his solo exhibition that opened earlier this week at Gefinor’s Espace Kettaneh-Kunigk. As the exhibition title suggests, “Beirut” centers on Arcangelo’s representations of Beirut.

It’s not so unusual for non-Lebanese artists to choose to live and work in Beirut, and it’s only natural that shades of the city find their way into their work. Arcangelo says he first arrived in Beirut this week, in time for the show’s opening.

His representations of Beirut are, he says, “an internal and imaginary journey.” Now that he’s actually come to the city, he continued, he’s learned many things that he “will use in his future paintings.”

Arcangelo works with a relatively limited palette of blues, yellow and pink pastels, green and, overwhelmingly, charcoal black. If these hues do not particularly resonate with Beirut residents, they underline how these works reflect Arcangelo’s vision of the capital more than the place itself.

In his mixed-media work “Giorno Arabo” (Arabic Day), 89x107cm, viewers face something like a deconstructed depiction – not in terms of technique but in the way different items are assembled within the same work.

On the upper part of the canvas, the sky is represented as a blue grid or latticework, rendered in two different shades of blue. The artist explained he was going for an effect similar to “the one in textile fabrics.” Two crescent moons are scrawled on this gridded sky in white chalk.

Below, the artist has adorned the grey-washed canvas with art naive-ish charcoal portrayals of several figures. To the left side of the canvas is a primitive scrawl of a male (or female) figure with a pointed headdress.

“They look like Phoenician figures,” Arcangelo suggests, referring to the bronze statuettes flogged in souvenir shops along the Lebanese coast.

On the right side of the work, you can distinguish a pair of structures which (supposing the projections rising from the peaked roves are meant to be crosses) could be churches.

The black charcoal smears arrayed across the bottom of the work – two of them apparently standing in for the “Phoenician” figure’s hands – most resemble burn marks, and so might be meant as representing explosions or perhaps the smoke billowing from fires.

Arcangelo explains that these are not actually meant to depict anything corporal, something to be seen or touched, but the artist’s “internal emotions,” as his feelings had singed the medium the way a lit match would burn a piece of paper.

Behind the pair of child-like renderings of structures the artist has drawn a pair of parabolic shapes that might be a massive arch. Just to the right of the human figure have been drawn six black lines (made by Arcangelo’s fingertips perhaps?). The two clusters of curved charcoal lines alongside the figure could well be “birds.”

Arcangelo’s “Arabic Day” is rife with somber, if vague, symbolism. “La Terra di Beirut” (The Land of Beirut), 89x110cm, is obscure by comparison.

Pink and yellow pastels are deployed, grid-like, on left and right sides of the canvas – which might conceivably be read as efforts to depict the sky. The center of the work is at once more vague and more somber.

A massive black smear dominates the center of the work, with a queue of half a dozen eye- or mouth-shaped ovoid shapes discernable through the gloom. An ensemble of smaller smears, some rendered as though “smoking,” are arrayed alongside. The pastels can be read as being a hopefully formalist juxtaposition hemming in the chaotic charcoal smudges.

Say what you like about Arcangelo’s work, it is a striking example of the quality of place-inspired art that can arise when the artist has had no personal experience of the place in question.

Arcangelo’s “Beirut” is on display at Gefinor’s Espace Kettaneh-Kunigk until March 10. For more information please call 01-738-706.