Galerie Claude Lemand

Khaled TAKRETI, Snapshots. Solo show, June 11-28, 2025.
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Contact : Nadine Fattouh , 06 61 24 33 74 , con­tac­t@­nadine­fat­touh.com , www.nadine­fat­touh.com
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Like all TAKRETI’s other series, Snapshots takes us on a journey full of sur­prising sto­ries and char­ac­ters. Each work is a story that we are invited to deci­pher.

In a style rem­i­nis­cent of Pop art, Takreti uses flat tints of colour enhanced by shim­mering col­lage motifs to paint lively com­po­si­tions that some­times reveal a hint of dark­ness or melan­choly. In images evoking pho­to­graphic snap­shots, we move from inti­mate inte­rior scenes to public spaces, from playful moments on the beach to unspoken secrets. Takreti tells per­sonal or anony­mous sto­ries that he has observed, in which he will­ingly stages him­self with deri­sion and humour. The artist tackles his favourite themes of family, love, iden­tity and sex­u­ality, and invites us to share in the daily lives of his pro­tag­o­nists, in their moments of plea­sure, chal­lenge and vul­ner­a­bility.

TAKRETI

A key figure on the Syrian-Lebanese scene, Takreti is a sur­prising and unclas­si­fi­able artist. Born in Beirut in 1964 to a Syrian family, he studied archi­tec­ture, design and engraving in Damascus before devoting him­self to painting in the 1990s. It was painting that enabled him to mourn the loss of his grand­mother, a sym­bolic figure cen­tral to the artist’s life and work. After spending time in Cairo, New York and Brussels, he set­tled in Paris in 2006 and con­tinues to make reg­ular visits to Beirut.

Using large for­mats, some­times treated as polyp­tychs, and a pic­to­rial lan­guage very close to pop art, Takreti doc­u­ments the world around him in all its beauty, weak­ness and fragility. Centred on the human figure, often strange or pic­turesque, his gaze is pro­found, some­times melan­choly, some­times amused, par­tic­u­larly when he stages him­self with a con­sum­mate sense of self-mockery. In fact, humour, which is almost con­stant in his paint­ings, allows him to keep his sub­jects at a dis­tance while enveloping them in an affec­tionate gaze.

Takreti’s work is reg­u­larly exhib­ited in gal­leries and in national and inter­na­tional insti­tu­tions: Musée de l’immi­gra­tion, Paris (2024); Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2018, 2021, 2023); Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence (2016); Musée de la Palmeraie, Marrakech (2014); the Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea (2014); Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2014); Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2011); Villa Emerige, Paris (2011).

His paint­ings are held in pri­vate and public col­lec­tions: Syrian National Museum, Damascus, Syria; Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; Musée de l’Institut du monde arabe, Paris (Donation Claude & France Lemand); Musée de l’his­toire de l’Immigration, Paris.