STAY LONGER
Nicodim New York
15 Greene Street
July 10 – August 15, 2025

PRESS RELEASE by José Andrés Mora

A painting can be like a memory, but only for the few moments it is being painted. Memories, despite being about the past, live only when they’re conjured in the present. So, after a painting is complete, and once the oil paint has cured, the remembering ends, and what remains on the canvas is a trace of something that has been.

In her solo exhibition, Stay Longer, Chantal Khoury’s paintings ruminate on images of kitchen tables, dining rooms, and coffee tables, all loosely set around the act of hosting others. The dishes, cups, fruits, and figurines that adorn these tables are a familiar language to her from her upbringing. A common thread across the works is the repeated appearance of these objects, which hints toward a central thesis in Khoury’s work: the things from our past that comprise who we are will never cure like a painted medium—they will only dissipate. Repeating the images over and over again is to extend their lives. To pick at the scar of something that has been is to draw life back into it, to consult it, and make sense of the present.

Khoury frequently depicts peacocks in her compositions, in large part reflecting the abundance with which the bird motif appears in ceramics and tapestries of the Levant region. The bird’s ornamental complexity echoes the abundance of the objects in the table settings. In the painting, Between Folds, a peacock stoically peers westward while its body consumes the entirety of the foreground. Khoury’s technique creates gestural lines that transform the peacock’s feathers into the intricate weaving of a tablecloth. Letting one’s eyes move across this calculated chaos reveals to a patient viewer the interwoven figural silhouettes of dancers moving in coordination, performing the Dabke. The dancers seem to appear and disappear, as though immune to coordinates. When the eye cannot rest, the figures need only to be still for us to see them move. This sense of movement and transfiguration permeates Khoury’s work, closely depicting the instability that breaks apart a memory when it is not recalled.

A similar sensibility manifests in the painting Coffee and Orange Blossoms, where three cups of coffee sit on the plane of a table drenched in nearly white, cerulean light, painted with similarly dancing strokes echoing the rhythm in the peacock’s feathers. The edges of the ceramics are nearly indiscernible, as though one’s eyes are adjusting to a new light. In this scene, the dark liquid bodies inside each coffee cup are gently pooled within this light. Despite being contained, the liquids seem to flow from one cup to another. This is a recurring element in Khoury’s work: the tendency for water to spill, to assume the shape of its vessel. Water will always want to flow down to our feet, and the four edges of her paintings gently hold the images from spilling to the floor.

Khoury’s works reflect how little there is that is unique to us as individuals, since most of the knowledge we hold is knowledge that is passed on to us. All the words we say are utterances of sounds that others have made. And like the words that we use, there is a learned lexicon and meaning to how we receive others at our table. It is easy to understand why the act of hosting and feeding others is so linked to someone’s “culture.” A dish is one of an infinite series of echoes that have passed and will continue to pass. Chantal Khoury understands this linkage and that we forge a sense of who we are in the small degrees of change we introduce to each utterance.

Chantal Khoury grew up as a second-generation Canadian, and as such, much of her understanding of herself is within this framing. For most of us, living anywhere within the continental Americas (North, Central, South) is to readily admit that at some point, you or your family came from elsewhere, and that is, in a sense, a form of comradery. Chantal Khoury lives and works in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

— José Andrés Mora

José Andrés Mora (he/him) is a Venezuelan-Canadian artist and writer living in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Mora graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design (2013, BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts) and the University of Guelph (2020, MFA in Studio Arts). Mora’s work elicits a sense of disconnect deeply tied to his experience as a member of the Venezuelan diaspora. Recently, Mora presented two solo exhibitions at Maison de la Culture (Montréal, 2023) and Latcham Arts Centre (Stouffville, 2023). He has exhibited across Canada since 2013 in notable galleries and public programs, including but not limited to Birch Contemporary (2019), Trinity Square Video (2020), Dalhousie Art Gallery (2020), Artspace Peterborough (2022), Art Metropole (2022), the Digital Arts Resource Centre (2022), and The Plumb (2022).