Galerie Claude Lemand

KHALED TAKRETI - POP ARTIST.
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Khaled Takreti is a sin­gular artist. When he is not painting por­traits or anony­mous char­ac­ters, he recur­rently uses irony and self-mockery in his works. His aston­ishing self-por­trait Bike 1 (2012), where he depicts him­self on a bicycle, merging man and object into a single entity. This approach is not meant to elicit an easy laugh. For the artist, as for Kierkegaard, humor always rests on a back­ground of seri­ous­ness and, with him, just as much on an under­lying work of intro­spec­tion. Thus, Joujoux, Hiboux, Cailloux (2014) cer­tainly stages strange, baroque, pic­turesque char­ac­ters, in acid tones, placed on back­grounds made up of large col­ored flat areas. However, the sug­gested Pop’art aes­thetic should hardly be taken at face value, because the melan­cholic faces and atti­tudes betray, when we linger on them, an unspoken heavy with meaning whose inter­pre­ta­tion is left to the viewer. .

His pic­to­rial lan­guage, very close to Pop art, allows him to approach the fail­ings of the world around him (for example the excesses linked to the con­sumer society, the restric­tions of freedom) with a sar­castic humor tinged with self-mockery, when he includes his own image in his com­po­si­tion. However, this humor rests on an obvious basis of seri­ous­ness; it seems to cor­re­spond to the bril­liant def­i­ni­tion given by Chris Marker: “the polite­ness of despair” and always trans­lates a second degree.

With Khaled Takreti, tragedy is played out in monochrome. Beirut (2020) res­onates as a tribute to the cap­ital before the explo­sion, through easily rec­og­niz­able nar­ra­tive ele­ments (the Pigeon Rock by Raouché, a map of the city, the Statue of the Martyrs, a painted facade on a building in Hamra, a wall tagged with a por­trait of Fairouz by Yazan Halwani, etc.).