Ihab Ahmad, I Put My Brain on Pause: a designer disabling his own hand

ALSERKAL AVENUE · DUBAI

Reading time: 9 min

The headline detail was the painted Lamborghini, and it is a good headline detail. The more interesting one is buried in the process: Ihab Ahmad made this body of work with his non-dominant hand, having spent his thirties at university learning precisely the compositional control he then set out to defeat.

---

I Put My Brain on Pause!, at Firetti Contemporary on Alserkal Avenue from 20 June to 20 August 2025, was the Lebanese artist Ihab Ahmad’s solo exhibition of oil and spray paint on linen, totem-like wooden sculptures, and one Lamborghini Huracán Spyder painted to match the canvases around it, made with Lamborghini Dubai. The gallery’s programme traces back to Praxis of Change, the ten-artist group show that ran through Dubai Design Week 2021, not long after Firetti Contemporary first opened at Alserkal Avenue.

The car did most of the publicity work, which is what a painted supercar is for. It also arrives with real pedigree, because putting an artist on a car body is a sixty-year-old idea with a well-documented lineage.

What is genuinely unusual sits in the method. Ahmad made this work with his non-dominant hand. He has described wanting to see what happened if he worked intuitively without overthinking, and the title is a fairly literal account of the technique rather than a mood. For an artist who took a degree in visual communication in his thirties specifically to sharpen his handling of colour and composition, deliberately handing the brush to the wrong hand is not a whim. It is the removal of a tool he went out of his way to acquire.

That decision is what the exhibition should be read through, including the car.

He learned composition late, then took it away

Ahmad was born in Beirut in 1983. He started drawing at eight, was interrupted when his family left for Cyprus during the civil war, and resumed on cardboard offcuts his father brought home from an engineering office. That is a common enough origin story until you get to the timing of the training.

He returned to university and took Visual Communication Art at the Lebanese University as a second major in his thirties, and describes it as the thing that refined his understanding of colour relationships and composition. In 2016 he founded Beirut Art Studio, teaching art to children and adults.

Visual communication is a design discipline, not a fine art one. It teaches hierarchy, legibility, the behaviour of colour against colour, how a mark reads at distance, how to resolve a composition so that a viewer’s eye goes where you send it. It is training in control, and it is the reason Ahmad’s earlier work does what it does: bold flat colour, thick black outline, tightly organised symbol vocabulary of fish, eyes, trees, birds, crowns and flowers. That is graphic language, and it is executed with a designer’s discipline.

So the interesting thing about this show is not that an intuitive artist worked intuitively. It is that a person who deliberately went and acquired compositional control in mid-life then engineered a way to stop using it.

What the wrong hand actually does

The technique rewards being taken seriously, because it does something specific to the mark and it is a considered act of drawing.

A trained hand carries defaults. Years of repetition build a set of motor habits that produce a certain curve, a certain corner, a certain stroke length, a certain instinct to correct a line towards the shape you already know. That is what training is for, and it is also why experienced makers find it hard to draw what is actually in front of them rather than the symbol they have stored for it. Switching hands does not remove intention. It removes the automatic execution of intention. The idea still arrives; the hand can no longer deliver it smoothly.

The results are consistent and, in the right hands, useful: wobbling contours, uneven pressure, marks that overrun where they should stop, a slower and more visible speed of drawing. In a practice built on thick confident outlines, that is a direct attack on the most recognisable feature of the work.

It also explains the shift to smiling faces, which every account of the show noted as new. Ahmad’s earlier vocabulary was full of eyes without mouths. A smile drawn confidently is a graphic device and reads as branding. A smile drawn by a hand that cannot fully control it reads as an expression, because it is slightly wrong in the way that faces are slightly wrong. The technique and the new subject arrived together, and neither would work without the other.

Worth adding, because it changes the register: the body of work was made during his mother’s illness with cancer. A man who teaches drawing to children, working through that with his wrong hand, making his first smiling faces, is not doing whimsy.

The Lamborghini is a contest of authorship

Now the car, which repays a much closer look than a headline allows.

The Huracán was launched in 2014, designed at Centro Stile Lamborghini under Filippo Perini, with the Spyder arriving at Frankfurt in 2015. Its surfaces are not neutral. A Lamborghini body is one of the most heavily authored objects in mass production: every crease, intake and shut line has been argued over, sculpted, wind-tunnelled and signed off, and the whole car is built on a hard-edged faceted geometry that reads as a single continuous piece of folded material. There is no decorative surface on it. There is nowhere the designers left blank.

So painting one is not like painting a canvas. It is putting a second author on top of a form that has already been fully resolved by a first one, and the two are competing for the same surface.

That is what makes the tradition interesting. The BMW Art Car project began in 1975, when the French racing driver and auctioneer Hervé Poulain asked Alexander Calder to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL, which Poulain then raced at Le Mans. Twenty official cars have followed, from Frank Stella and Roy Lichtenstein through Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Jeff Koons to Julie Mehretu in 2024. The strongest ones tend to do one of two things: either they follow the car’s geometry and amplify it, or they treat the body as one continuous surface, so that the graphic wins outright. Both routes commit completely to the object, and that commitment is what gives the tradition its charge.

Ahmad’s Huracán takes the second approach. The pattern language runs across the body as it runs across a canvas, treating the car as one field rather than as a set of panels, which is the right instinct given that his vocabulary is flat and graphic rather than sculptural. It earns the surface by refusing to negotiate with it: a hand-drawn idiom built on wobble and overrun set directly against a body whose entire appeal is precision. The tension is real and it is the most interesting thing about the object. It is also held completely in the open.

There is a wider reading available too, and it is worth stating plainly. A gallery on Alserkal Avenue collaborating with Lamborghini Dubai is a genuine partnership as well as a project, and the car carries Ahmad’s work into outlets that would not otherwise write about a Lebanese painter. That is how art cars have always functioned, including in 1975 when Poulain wanted a canvas that could race at Le Mans. It is worth knowing while looking at it.

The totems and the temperature of the room

The wooden totem sculptures are the quietest part of the show and the part that does the most spatial work.

Standing vertical elements change how a room is used in a way that hung work cannot. Paintings organise a visitor around the perimeter and leave the middle empty. Totems put obstacles in the floor plan, which forces circulation, creates sightlines between objects, and means the canvases are seen past something rather than in isolation. In a warehouse gallery with a lot of volume, that is the difference between an exhibition and a hang.

They also do something to the colour. Ahmad’s palette is saturated and high-contrast, and bringing that same language into three dimensions gives the eye a reference for how those colours behave on a curved or edged surface under real light, which in turn makes the flatness of the paintings a choice rather than a limit.

This is also the connective tissue to the car. Painted totem, painted car, painted canvas: the show is consistently interested in what happens when a graphic language is asked to wrap an object instead of sit on a plane. That is a design question, and it is the question the exhibition is actually asking.

Where its strength lies

Two things stand out.

The first is the confidence that sits inside the method. Deliberately loosening your control is only interesting if there was control to lose, and here there plainly was: a mid-life degree in visual communication and years of tightly organised graphic work behind it. The looseness reads as discovery rather than manner, largely because the reason for it is specific and personal rather than aesthetic. That is what gives the show its footing.

The second concerns the smiling faces. They are the emotional centre of the exhibition and they carry the most weight in the room. A bright playful character on a bright playful ground is an immediately appealing object, and the audience for it in Dubai is large. The works that hold hardest are the ones where the drawing is genuinely unsteady and the expression is genuinely odd, and this show is full of them. The smile stays an expression rather than a mark, which is exactly what the premise asks of it.

Both points build the work up. Both are worth stating because the show’s own logic invites them.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Painted supercars have a long and serious history, and the form has produced genuinely good objects for fifty years. The car is one good reason this show was worth seeing, and there is a bigger one.

The reason is a man who spent his thirties going back to university to learn how colour and composition actually work, built a controlled graphic language out of it, and then, during the hardest year of his life, moved the brush to the hand that could not execute it properly. Everything else in the room follows from that: the mouths that appear for the first time because a shaky line can hold an expression where a clean one cannot, the totems that test the same language on a solid, and the car that tests it on somebody else’s finished design.

That is a show about what happens when a designer removes his own best tool. It is a rich subject, and it runs far deeper than joy.