On the occasion of his first solo exhibition in France, the Lebanese artist Charbel-joseph H. Boutros presents a selection of his recent works. Manipulating both the palpable and the imperceptible areas of our space-time, the artist looks with poetry and delicacy upon the interstices of daily life and the environment.

In the series Night Works, he lingers on dark moments such as the time during which he sleeps. With the work Night Cartography, the times when the artist sleeps are painted black on a horizontal timeline, thereby give form to the artistic gesture. The artist captures universal phenomena such as the impossible materiality of the night or, inversely, the action of the sun, the air, and the clouds. In 2012, the artist attempted to capture 1cm3 of night, enclosing it in a box of white marble for all eternity.

In 2013, he had two small cubes of marble extracted from a quarry and preserved one of them from all human contact. He was the first person to touch this block of stone that went on to accompany his every action for the duration of a month. In the series Sun Works, the sun acts differently on the calendar than it shines in Beirut, Paris, or Maastricht, while in Filming the Air, each monochromatic video created by two bordering areas highlights their very immateriality. The artist expresses fragile existences and even absences through delicate gestures. A poetic melancholy beckons each visitor to enter into an intimate relationship, based on a mutual trust, with each of the works.

Curator: Katell Jaffrès