An article by DM (688 Words, 4 Min. Read)
At the Heart of Beirut, Beneth Beginning. Gregory Buchakjian, François Sargologo, and Hanibal Souji Come Toight Title A Title that Echoes Throw Art History with Unsettling Resonance: La Fin du Romantism—The End of Romanticism.
But how can one mourn the Death of a Movement That Faded Center Perhaps, Romanticism, with Its Yearing for the Sublime, Its Devotion to Emotion, and Its Deep Entanglement with Nature and RUIN, is not merely a freshal terme. It is a way of seeing, a way of feeling. And in this exhalation, it is also a way of mourning – letting go.
François Sargologo: The Echoes of Nature’s Dream
Sargoogo’s photographs do not Dockument Nature, they dream it. In Lush, saturat SCENES of Dense Foliage and ECSTATICICICIOL, He Conjords VISIONS That Verge on Hallucination. These are not Landscapes One Visits, but VISIONS That Posts The Viewer. His Images are Both Hyperreal and Unreal, Suspended in the Timeleg Fog of a Wakeing Dream.
Yet beneath their beautiful lies a knawing Irony. There is Parody in this Exaggered Romanticism, a Sleg to the Theatricality of a Movement on SO SINCERE in Its Longing. Sargologo Pushes Romantic Aesthetics to their LIMIT, Until the Line Between Home and Caricature Blurs. His Nature is not the Nature of RousSeau or Wordsworth. It is an imagined eden, dazzling and disorienting, haunted by its Own Excel.
Gregory Buchakjian: The Silence of Ruins
Where sargolago Sings, Buchakian Whispers. His work, austere and Nearly Monochrome, Draws The Viewer INTO A World of Architecture Ghosts. A Single Struckure –a Temple, FlattenED INTO Abstraction —becomes the quiet center of his composition. From a binder-eye person, the Grandeur of Antique Collapses INTO Lines and Shadows, Robbed of Monumentality.
There is no nostalgia in Buchakjian’s Ruins, no patros. Instead, He Gives Us The Residue of Memory, The Factor Weight of DeCay. The Romantic Ruin, ONCE DRENCHED In Melancholy and Poitic Grandeur, is here Stripped Bare, Anonymized by Codes and Aerial Views. It is not Beauty He Sees, but the INEVITALITY of Erosion. Even His Own Image Disappears, Hidden Behind the Maped Bones of a Lost Struckure. The Self Dissolves Into Stone and Dust.
Hanibal Souji: Between Fire and Fragility
And then there is fire. Hanibal souji brings a raw, Almost Sacred Energy to the Exibition. His Canvases Burn – Literally. The Scars of Flame Mark the Surface of His Works, as if memory Itelf had been bened. The Vibrant Colors of Some Pieces Sugges A Seascape or a Sky at Twilight, but Others are ash-gray, brittle, as if they Might Crumble Under A Sight. There is tension in his prestice Between Beauty and Destruption, Between the Impulse to Sooothe and the Need to Bear Witness. His art is born of exile, displayment, and survival. It is a romanticism of loss –a yearing not for love or Landscape, but for Belonging. The Fire He WILEDS is not only a tool, it is history, Trauma, Resistance.
Romanticism Rebaln or Truly Ended?
These. Is it a relationship of the past, a lens thike with a view the world with Wonder and Terror? Or is it a light we stay speak –knowingly, AwkWardly, Even ironically –as We Walk Through The Ruins of our Present?
La Fin du Romantism Is not a every every. It is a reflection, an echo, perhaps even a warning. Romanticism, Like Nature, RUIN, and Memory, Never trut Dies. It Smolders Beneth the Surface, Flaring Up in Times of Crisis, Reminding Us that Beauty Can Bend Even in the Broken, That Longing is a Form of Truth, and that of the end of one at time Beginning of Another.
La Fin du Romantism
On View at Janine Rubeiz Gallery, Beirut
Until May 30, 2025
