Artist Elias Izoli depicts life in Bashar Al Assad's Syria as a sad circus

Elias Izoli’s circus is not a place of joy.

The paintings in Inside Out ’25, the Syrian artist's solo exhibition at Ayyam Gallery, are vibrant, drawing from the bold and whimsical palettes associated with the circus. And yet, they instil melancholy.

His performers are depicted as burdened beings. The tightrope walkers look towards their destination with a thousand-yard stare. The trapeze artists, swinging from monumental heights, have their eyes closed, not in fear but as if seeking to be elsewhere. The clowns applying make-up in the mirror look at themselves with sullen eyes, reflecting the jaded cloudiness inflicted by a litany of indistinguishable days.

These expressions of exasperation and resignation will be familiar to anyone cycling through drab, routinary coils. But the adversity in Izoli’s paintings reflect a specific brand of daily drudgery, one experienced in the Syria ruled by Bashar Al Assad.

“I began working on these paintings before the ousting,” says Izoli. “I was thinking about our daily lives. You’d wake up in the morning, have to pass through checkpoints and barriers, not say a word. You'd feel like you’re in a circus, walking a tightrope and trying to keep your balance.

“Every Syrian, even those in the diaspora, know what I’m talking about, the balance you had to find. To hold the truth in your heart even if you couldn’t say it out loud, but console yourself by knowing it was within you.”

Izoli’s subjects clearly express this, confronting the viewer with their knowing glances. These internal struggles are also represented in the physicality of those depicted.

“The weight I’m giving them,” Izoli says, “are their troubles, their worries and their dread. Despite all of that, you are required to stay balanced, to fulfil your role and carry out your due performance, right on cue. Why? To survive. You try to prove to yourself that you need to survive. Not for the public or for others, but for yourself.”

The title of the exhibition, Inside Out ’25, reflects these contradictions across several strata. The gaze of Izoli’s subjects could be interpreted as confrontational or a look of tacit solidarity. Either way, they don't break the barrier between viewer and subject. If anything, that separation is accentuated – due to the intensity of the gaze, as well as the unique paper collage technique Izoli applies to the canvas, giving it a textured, almost diaphanous barrier.

“Whoever is inside the circus is looking outward, and there are people on the outside looking in,” Izoli says.

“You can come up with a million interpretations of what each expression means, as they look at the world outside as those condemned to play the same game every day with the same energy and continuity.”

While life under the Assad regime is the central inspiration for Izoli’s circus series, he says it was impossible not to reflect upon other geopolitical events in the region. A painting of a black-suited juggler, for instance, reflects upon the tragedies in Gaza, Izoli says. “Despite all the tragedies within this body, she is continuing to juggle.”

The universal circus symbolism is something Izoli is keen to continue exploring, despite the changes in daily life in Damascus since Al Assad was overthrown.

“It’s the first foray. I’ve just drawn the curtain and I’m only discovering what I can do with its tools, with its characters. I still haven’t experimented with its animals, for instance,” says the artist.

The theme also gives Izoli the opportunity to be as vibrant as he likes. As an artist, he says he can’t help but infuse his works with as many colours as he can. “It is a love,” he says. “It has nothing to do with whether I’m happy or sad, or the work that I’m creating is happy or sad. I just like using colour as much as a child who has a bunch of paints and wants to throw them all on the canvas.”

Inside Out ‘25 is on display at Ayyam Gallery, Dubai, until November 6