First monograph.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at S.M.A.K., Ghent, and La Criée, Rennes, in 2020-2022.
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros (born 1981 in
Lebanon) merges Romanticism with conceptual art in works about intimate, geographical, and political narratives. The essence of his practice is "sculpting invisibility" and treating it as a material. Elusive notions such as dreams, boundaries, distance, sleep, darkness, and place are all domains that the artist tries to actualize.
Often monochromatic and melancholic, his works spanning installation, sculpture, and video are haunted by the history of his native Lebanon, as well as the anxieties latent in contemporary society. Boutros's oeuvre is like a discreet landscape where an intimate experience conceals a reflection on space, time, and the past's formation of the present, finding poetic lines that extend beyond the realm of existing speculations and realities.
Boutros was a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands and resident at the Pavillon of the
Palais de Tokyo. His work was shown internationally at the 12th Istanbul Biennial, the 3rd Bahia Biennial and the first Yinchuan Biennale. He has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Punta Della Dogana, Venice; Centre Pompidou, Metz; CCS Bard College, New York; MAM-BA Museum of Modern Art, Salvador; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah and La Criée, centre d'art contemporain, Rennes.
