Charbel-joseph H. Boutros

Born in 1981 in Lebanon
Lives and works between Beirut and Paris.

Born in Lebanon in the midst of the civil war (1978-1990), Charbel-joseph H. Boutros' work does not seek to reflect reality, but rather to resist it, by capturing the immaterial. His works are based on personal experience, geography (particularly his many travels), art history and political and historical questioning. The artist approaches invisibility as a material in its own right, mixing concrete, wax and marble with wishes, love and sunlight.

He is a representative of the young Lebanese art scene, whose work is presented internationally. He has been a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands, and at the Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo, where he has exhibited (during a module in 2014; and Sueur d'étoile, intervention on the roof of the building in 2015).

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros has presented his work at the Palais de Tokyo, the Istanbul International Biennial (Turkey), the Centre Pompidou - Metz, S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Punta della Dogana (Venice), Home Works 8, Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), Beirut Art Center, CCS Bard College (New York), Bahia Biennale (Brazil), Yinchuan Biennale (China), Musée d'arts de Nantes, LaM, Villeneuve d'Ascq, Musée d'art moderne de Salvador (Brazil), Barjeel art foundation, Sharjah, etc. He is represented by Grey Noise, Grey Noise, CCS Bard College (New York).

He is represented by Grey Noise (Dubai), Jaqueline Martins Gallery (São Paulo and Brussels), Galeria Vera Cortês (Lisbon).

In an interview with artist Ismaïl Bahri in 2015, he clarifies his working process thus:

All my pieces culminate in something on the order of the invisible. They all start from an element of reality: I never go looking for something exceptional to begin a piece. They're part of the everyday: a calendar, night, salt, sugar, water. They belong to our reality, which is very quickly transcended. All my research is concerned with an aesthetic of the invisible.

My pieces seem minimal, but they open other doors. There's a link with Duchamp, with Duchamp's desire to free himself from the retinal. [...] My work proposes a mental landscape. I want to escape reality by proposing a different kind of poetics that goes beyond the everyday.