Interpreting Moments

Intuition is Léa Malas’s primary tool. An intuitive artist, she translates moments of vision or thought into visual language, giving her artwork its distinct originality. Her originals, unless reproduced digitally, are never recreated using the same process. Each piece is unique and holds special value, both for the artist and for those who feel drawn to live with it.

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Born in France, raised in Beirut, and based in Norway since 2018, Léa navigates a richly multicultural identity. She grew up speaking Arabic, French, and English, and now also speaks Norwegian. Drawing has been part of her life for as long as she can remember. As a child in Beirut, her early promise in drawing led her to be mentored by the Lebanese artist Hassan Yatim, who encouraged her to join his adult art class at just nine years old. There, she learned the foundational techniques of charcoal, pencil, light and shadow, human anatomy, and perspective. It was a rigorous start that shaped her approach even as she later moved into freer, more fluid forms of expression.

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Though her formal education was disrupted by economic and personal circumstances, Léa pursued undergraduate studies in Biology, English Translation, and Law. Alongside this academic path, she built a diverse work history. In Lebanon, she worked as a bookstore officer and sales representative. In Norway, she took on roles as a waitress, hotel shop steward, cleaner, English teacher, and school assistant.

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These lived contrasts; between manual labor and teaching, between the Arab world and Western Europe, between Arabic and Western cultural codes, and between humanities and sciences, are central to her work. They have deeply shaped her artistic expression, cultivating a sensitivity to duality, dislocation, and transformation. Her art emerges from this tension: the space between cultural poles, between languages, disciplines, and kinds of labor and identity.

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She chooses abstract art as her primary mode of expression precisely because it reflects this complexity. The ambiguity and emotional openness of abstraction allow her to translate life’s richness, its ruptures, migrations, and reinventions, into visual form. Abstraction becomes a language through which she can process what she has lived, seen, and felt. She sees the abstract world wide enough to swing between the classical order and unbound expression depending on what fit her subject best.

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Léa’s work is also informed by the visual culture of her upbringing in Beirut, a city marked by both layered history and constant flux. The vibrant colors, architectural forms, and visual rhythm of that city remain embedded in her eye and hand. She is particularly influenced by the works of Lebanese painters Moustafa Farroukh and Hussein Madi and his bold expression of the woman using vibrant colors.

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In addition, Léa is a lover of repetitive geometric patterns, especially as they appear in Arabic art and architecture. She finds inspiration in the structure and harmony of these designs, which often make their way, consciously or intuitively, into her compositions.

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Her first public exhibition took place in 2019, during her time in Northern Norway. Immersed in the overwhelming beauty of the Arctic wilderness and the dancing auroras, she felt compelled to translate that internal and external awe into visual form. It was a powerful turning point that launched her into the public art world. Her next exhibition, Metamorphosis (2024), took place during her pregnancy. She was deeply fascinated by the overwhelming changes in a woman’s body and mind, and once again turned to art as the most honest way to express what could not be said in words.

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While Léa has often been told to stick to one style or develop a singular “signature,” she resists this. Her art, like her life, refuses easy categorization. She draws inspiration from polymaths of the Arab golden age, such as Ibn Sina and Al-Khwarizmi, whose example encourages a lifelong curiosity across fields as they have done it all from poetry to astronomy. Though she does not consider herself a polymath, she believes deeply in the power of interdisciplinary exploration. For her, artistic expression is not separate from intellectual growth. It is a parallel form of knowledge, born from the same core.

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Today, Léa Malas continues to create abstract and contemporary works that reflect a life lived across languages, geographies, and disciplines. Her work is an invitation to others, especially those who feel scattered or "too much," to see beauty in complexity and to trust that wholeness can exist without limitation.