The Middle East, 2014, is a striking large-scale painting which depicts the wreckage of a Middle East Airlines (MEA) aircraft. It addresses the Israeli forces attack on Beirut International Airport during the Israeli siege of Beirut on 10 June 1982. Along with the invasion of Beirut, Israeli warplanes attacked Beirut International Airport and bombed six MEA and TMA Boeing 707 and 720 aircrafts parked on the tarmac.

Beirut International Airport, Lebanon’s main air hub, has been repeatedly targeted during periods of conflict. The first assault on the airport occurred in 1968, when the Israeli military destroyed 13 MEA planes. The second attack happened in 1976, one year into the Lebanese Civil War, where one MEA plane was destroyed. The third of these attacks is represented in this The Middle East, 2014.

In this painting, a fragmented fuselage stretches across a four-meter-wide canvas, with its mangled form gradually rendered in thick, frenetic layers of paint. On the right side of the canvas, the plane’s tail emerges clearly, bearing the airline’s iconic older logo: a green cedar tree encircled in white, set against a red background.

Upon closer examination, the painting comes alive as an explosion of acrylic paint, applied through splashes, smears, drips, and broad, dynamic brushstrokes. The color palette oscillates between shades that depict a haunting image of an aircraft in the aftermath of a fire—such as dark brown, umber, burgundy, red, and lilac—and those that convey a sense of hope, including white, turquoise, yellow, and orange. This contrast is also evident in the various collaged materials that the artist layers onto the canvas surface before applying the acrylic paint.

Baalbaki incorporates cut out bill board paper and pieces of advertising posters collected off the street, some of which can be seen on the upper right register of the painting with the letters ‘BLE’. On the far-left side, the rest of the wrecked airplane dissolves into masses of paint obscuring the work’s legibility as a plane and heightening the sense of its violent disintegration. Again, on closer inspection, the viewer notices cut-out prints and ready-made floral fabric embedded beneath the dense layering of acrylic paint. This is a common motif from Baalbaki’s repertoire, whereby he mounts ready-made floral fabrics as the first layer on the canvas, on top of which he applies paint in thick, gestural, and furious brushstrokes, mimicking the harrowing frenzy of moments of destruction.

There is something unsettling about this work’s corporeality, where the twisted wreckage almost resembles the carcass of a creature, its exposed spine arching over a shredded body. This piece touches upon a Lebanese collective memory in relation to the attacks on Beirut airport and the iconography of MEA. However, for Baalbaki, the painting functions beyond simply a depiction of an event or a recollection of a past memory; rather, this work becomes a form of cumulative premonition.

When viewed at different times since its production in 2014, the work has come to reflect a broader sense of anxiety that the world is not right. In that, there is a deep pessimism and a bleak outlook that leaves little room for imagining a different future where there is peace or balance - that is, where the carcass can belong solely to a collective memory and not be a reflection of the present. The Middle East, 2014, is one more artwork by Baalbaki dedicated to Lebanon’s turbulent history. 

Diptych, signed in Arabic and dated in English front lower right