Artist Marwan Nahlé is inviting Salt Lake City viewers into quietly powerful inner worlds with his new exhibition “The Domains of the Mystical” at the Sweet Branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library. On view through December 20, 2025, the show gathers around two dozen small-scale paintings, each roughly notebook sized, yet visually expansive in mood and meaning.
Instead of grand panoramas, Nahlé uses swirling brushwork, layered color fields and tiny human figures to explore how people exist inside vast and shifting landscapes. The figures often appear alone or in small groups, dwarfed by sky, rock, or atmospheric space. This contrast between scale and detail pulls the viewer into questions of presence, memory and how humans read the land around them.
Born into a postwar Lebanese art family, Nahlé grew up moving between Europe, Africa and the Middle East before settling in Utah in the late 1990s. The desert’s open horizons and shifting light became a major influence on his work. While employed at Phillips Gallery, he developed a style that leans toward emotion and atmosphere instead of narrative illustration. Rather than telling a literal story, each canvas functions as a moment of feeling a brief pause where landscape and inner life overlap.
Nahlé’s paintings nod to Romanticism, but they do not behave like traditional landscape art. Instead of carefully rendered trees, mountains or city streets, viewers encounter simplified silhouettes and luminous color fields. A single figure might stand on the edge of a glowing expanse, or two small forms might appear at the border of textured color, suggesting conversation, solitude, or quiet ritual. In these works, color and mood carry the message, and the human presence becomes a measure of scale and vulnerability.
Beyond painting, the exhibition hints at Nahlé’s broader creative practice. He works with recycled materials, mixed media and collage, often transforming discarded objects into human-like figures or symbolic forms. These sculptures and layered pieces show the same curiosity about how materials hold memory, and how the human body can be suggested rather than fully depicted. By combining paint, photographs and found imagery, he builds surfaces that feel both fragile and dense, echoing the layered histories of the landscapes that inspire him.
Together, the works in “The Domains of the Mystical” give a compact yet rich overview of Nahlé’s range. Small in size but expansive in feeling, they encourage viewers to slow down, notice scale and reconsider where the human story sits inside the larger story of place.
The show is free and open to the public at the Sweet Branch Library, part of the Salt Lake City Public Library system, with support from regional arts organizations such as the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, which champions visual art across the state.
Visitors who step into the exhibition will find not just landscapes, but invitations to reflect on distance, closeness and what it means to be a small figure in a large, shifting world.
