What happens when a familiar landscape is no longer simply something we see, but something we remember, reinterpret and feel?

For Emirati artist Alia Zaal, looking is an intimate act. In her first solo exhibition at Gallery Isabelle, In Plain Sight, landscapes are stripped of their panoramic familiarity and brought into close focus. Leaves, branches, light and colour become the protagonists of a quiet visual language, one shaped as much by memory and perception as by the physical world.

Based between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Zaal draws inspiration from the environments that surround her. Yet rather than presenting the UAE through recognisable cityscapes or sweeping desert vistas, she turns her attention towards details that might otherwise go unnoticed. A cluster of ghaf leaves, the texture of foliage or the changing light across a familiar landscape becomes an invitation to pause and look again.

Across paintings on canvas, paper, fabric and ceramic, Zaal creates a dialogue between different materials and ways of seeing. Her works often appear suspended between clarity and disappearance, allowing landscapes to emerge gradually rather than revealing themselves at once.

This tension is particularly evident in Biarritz Evening and Biarritz by Night, where blurred foliage seems to float beneath the painted surface. The absence of a fixed focal point transforms the act of looking into something slower and more contemplative. The landscape is there, but never entirely still.

Elsewhere, the artist returns to the ghaf tree, the national tree of the UAE, treating it not as a symbol to be monumentalised but as something deeply familiar. In Ghaf Memory in Biarritz, delicate leaves fill the composition, their fine structures resembling woven threads. What might appear at first to be a simple botanical study becomes instead a meditation on place, memory and the fragments through which we construct our sense of home.

Memory becomes even more tangible in Mushrif Mist. Referencing the Mushrif Parks of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the work evokes the atmosphere of places embedded in the memories of generations who have grown up in the UAE. Its luminous quality suggests moonlight, while the softened landscape seems to hover between recollection and reality.

Zaal’s landscapes are therefore never entirely objective. They are filtered through individual perception, emotion and experience. This idea becomes especially personal in Through his Eyes, a series inspired by her father’s way of seeing and his difficulty distinguishing certain colours. Through layered blues, greens, purples and dark tones, Zaal reconstructs landscapes according to another visual experience, suggesting that there is no single way of seeing the world.

Her interest in perception also reaches back to a much older intellectual tradition. The exhibition engages in dialogue with Ibn al-Haytham’s eleventh-century Kitab al-Manazir, or The Book of Optics, a foundational study of light, vision and perception. Centuries later, Zaal approaches similar questions through contemporary tools, using photographs taken on her smartphone as visual references for her paintings.

The contrast is striking: an ancient scholar investigating the mechanics of sight, and a contemporary artist exploring how seeing becomes memory.

In Afternoon in Al Jubail and Sunset in Al Jubail, Zaal turns towards Abu Dhabi’s Jubail Island, with its mangroves, tidal waterways and coastal ecosystems. Here, the landscape appears on fabric, allowing the image to soften and dissolve into its material surroundings. The fragility of the medium mirrors the fleeting quality of the scenes themselves.

Throughout In Plain Sight, Zaal reminds us that looking is never merely passive. To look closely is to preserve. It is to transform an ordinary fragment into something charged with memory and emotion.

Her work ultimately asks us to reconsider the landscapes we think we know. Beneath every familiar tree, every shifting shadow and every fragment of foliage lies another story—one shaped by time, personal experience and the changing nature of memory.

Sometimes, seeing more does not require looking farther.

It simply requires looking closer.