La Fin du Romantisme brings together Gregory Buchakjian, François Sargologo, and Hanibal Srouji—three artists whose practices, though distinct, share a sensitivity to rupture, memory, and the persistence of image. A decade after their first encounter in Pellicula, they reunite to explore what remains when the romantic impulse fades: what survives beyond beauty, beyond longing? In this exhibition, the landscape becomes both subject and witness—burnt, superimposed, lush, or undone. The boundaries between mediums blur, and with them, the lines between past and present. We asked each artist a few questions, in the spirit of ongoing conversation.
In Conversation with Gregory Buchakjian
In your work, ruins and fragments often become protagonists. How do you see the role of fiction in the way we reconstruct history from these traces?
Out of order places, like abandoned houses that were my main focus for a decade, are storytelling machines. Once you cross the threshold, debris and remains allow characters and events to emerge, crisscrossing between intimate and historical levels. Based on factual proof, these stories are supposed to be true. However, these may be unrealistic and eventually contradictory, like, for example, a lady named Victoria for whom Valerie Cachard and I extracted results of medical exams dated four years after her alleged funeral.
Regarding the present exhibition, when François Sargologo proposed The End of Romanticism, he was interested in the bias that was involved through Romanticism as an artistic and literary movement, notably with Orientalism and wanted to confront this gaze with our era, that of post-truth.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether people believe or not that my artistic practice is based on facts. It doesn’t even matter if it is actually based on reality or on fiction. Jacques Rancière says that “What is at issue is not the truth of facts. It is the form of rationality of their linkage.”
You superimpose a Roman temple onto an industrial site—what kind of temporal frictions or poetic dissonances were you hoping to evoke in this gesture?
In 2022, I was part of Scratch the Surface, Touch the Sun, organized by (TAP) Temporary Art Platform in Hosn Niha. Filled with stones piled on each other, the temple looked as if it was the site of a recent catastrophe. It evoked to me the silos of the Port of Beirut that were, at this time, burning, two years after the 4th of August blast. I therefore decided to make Hosn Niha a marker of the silos that became themselves markers of the blast. My intervention consisted of drawing, on and around the temple, the scheme of the silos, consisting of 48 circles of 8,5 m diameter each, with white chalk. Unexpectedly, my work was interrupted and erased by employees of the site (I say unexpectedly because we priorly submitted the proposal to the Directorate General of Antiquities that was a partner for the operation). What remained was the visual documentation produced by the drone that accompanied me. At Galerie Janine Rubeiz, I am displaying an aerial view of Hosn Niha drawn on a sheet of paper. It took me two months to complete the most precise depiction of the edifice, stone by stone.
In the meantime, I resumed the project at the Alita factory from where came the chalk used in Hosn Niha. The factory ceased its operations for decades and its grounds are home of MACAM – Modern and Contemporary Art Museum. The drone operator who filmed me in Hosn Niha followed me in Alita while I accomplished performative actions aiming to knot the links between the three sites (the factory, the temple and the silos) that share their large scale, their past prosperity and their state of dereliction.
Your practice often walks the line between the archive and the personal. How do you negotiate authorship in this in-between space?
When I submitted my Phd dissertation, the jury were surprised to read such an unorthodox paper that trailed the autobiographical path of its author. People may wonder how special is the story of my life, it is actually not and this is the point. A few years ago, the Fotofocus Biennale in Cincinnati wanted to show Abandoned Dwellings. When they reached me, we were in the midst of the collapse and the post-explosion of the port. I wanted to address what we were going through and asked the organizers if we could allocate one of the rooms at my disposal for a new project. This is how I created Record of an Ordinary Life, which I defined as “a time capsule unfolding threads of history through the subjective eye of a witness. The process follows a chronology that starts with the artist’s birth and will end with his death. Divided in chapters, it comprises photography, writing, video and archive documents.” What I presented in Cincinnati covered a timeline from October 2019 to October 2021.
My wall installation at Galerie Janine Rubeiz is entitled HN51 over the Artist’s Body. HN51 is the Directorate General of Antiquities’ reference for the great temple of Hosn Niha. The drawing of the Roman temple is pinned over a wallpaper with a drone view of Alita. Lying under the drone on the ground of the industrial site, my body is sandwiched between layers of rubble. We are all somehow shattered under piles of rubble.
In Conversation with Hanibal Srouji
Fire recurs in your recent works—what does it symbolise for you today, politically, spiritually, or otherwise?
Using fire as a mark making process seeped in my painting in the early 1990’s. The raw cotton canvas became my skin, and fire came to mark it.
I was 18 when the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975. My generation was sacrificed, derooted… a burnt generation. Yes, fire is a force. If let loose, it can be destructive. Yet, it is pure energy that we need to create. I see it as an instrument that can purify matter and express the sublime.
We started working for this exhibition last year. The opening date was to be on Oct 7 2024, but the War in Lebanon did not permit this to happen. The artworks were conceived within the tragic events which were taking place in the region… working with fire was a natural choice…. an attempt to touch the immaterial… and focus on positive precious human values.
Your paintings move between saturated color and achrome desolation. What guides this oscillation—mood, memory, geography?
For this exhibition I intended to present large colorful works and proportionally smaller works almost achromatic. My work has evolved in stages that parallels the stages of healing. Acceptance is the foundational stage of the recovery journey, after a trauma. Then comes the necessary rebalance and healing. Positive outlooks and perspectives are essential.
Today, I believe that we are living with an outlook for a hopeful future from within a traumatic imposed reality. Is it a fantasy?
We are living extremes. An end of an era.
You’ve worked across many continents. How do you think displacement shapes the language of abstraction?
Displacement offers a chance of experiencing and seeing realities from different perspectives. This distancing allowed me to reflect on what we have gone through, with a certain detachment.
In the series “Land / Sea” I acknowledge the fact that: “Yes, we were forced into displacement…” Yet, it has become the subject.
The “Land / Sea” series are referential landscape paintings, where space is intentionally ambiguous as it offers different possible visual spatial readings.
“ Are we in or out… Are we leaving or coming back”. A vision where space and temporality are repetitively put in question.
In Conversation with François Sargologo
Nature is lush, almost excessive, in your latest series. Is this abundance a form of resistance, nostalgia, or perhaps warning?
Indeed, La Fin du romantisme is characterised by the omnipresent simulacrum of exuberant nature. This opulent nature, likened to a state of “daydreaming”, conjures up the Sublime—that is, a feeling that goes beyond the Beautiful and paradoxically evokes dread and disquiet; it thus goes beyond Romanticism. Nature becomes the mirror, the opposite of our own age, which, while it too amazes us with its achievements, progress, and exuberance, also engenders fear and concern because of its excesses. This is not a series of sterile, contemplative nostalgias for a fantasised past or Nature, but rather a harbinger of an uncertain future. From then on, the desire to accentuate the beauty and power of Nature sounds like the energy of despair—the last act in which everything is given and shown in excess, a kind of headlong rush to the end of a bygone era, before the arrival of a future that feels uncertain and anxious.
You often work with memory’s fragility. What kinds of silences or absences do you try to make visible through your images?
It’s true that the fragmentation of memory and its fragility are at the heart of my concerns. In my work, I seek to erase oblivion, to generate a reminiscence of memory, which is by definition fragile and fallible. My work therefore consists in bringing back a forgotten history, making audible what time has rendered silent, and visible what events may have erased. This is the thread that runs through all my collections.
What is the role of Beirut in your work today—still a site of loss, or has it become a place for invention?
War, exile, uprooting, and all that goes with it, has made my generation what we are! It’s something unique, as is Beirut, which reflects the history of those who have lived there, had to leave, or returned. To answer your question, I would say that Beirut is a complex place: I need to distance myself from it to better deconstruct it, in order to paradoxically better grasp and understand it.