Exhibition
14 November 2024
Solo show by Chaouki Choukin: Citadelles of Today
Green Art Gallery
Chaouki Choukini’s sculptures are complex objects, often described as sets of hybrid organic/mechanic, abstract/figurative, linear/non-linear shapes and volumes. They grab the attention of the viewer by making manifest multiple scales of surface in a kind of endless convergence of polarities—an open-ended experience, without a clear start or finish. Since the 1970s, rather than simply erecting a sculpture, Choukini has been mastering this way of displaying his plateau—a visual and conceptual horizon of accurately studied shapes and symbols—with a vibrant visual language that never feels outdated, expressing visual expansion, agility, and unrest.
One of the numerous innovations of this approach is the revival of a range of traditional
techniques and skills (such as tile making, engraving, pottery, and weaving). The eye that follows the irregular veins of Choukini’s sculptures will be struck by the subtle visual metaphors of the various plateaus, rough zones, and soft zones. His works are conceptually founded on texture and density, bringing the sculptor’s task into the realm of the writer or poet; as they weave one word into another, so he weaves space.
The effectiveness of Choukini’s sculptures could be conceptualized as a textural maze through
which our gaze walks, lost but for a few clues to guide it. In this way, Choukini’s work differs from the praxis of modernist or minimalist sculpture, as he is resistant to its supposedly self-reflective, self-explanatory, and monumentalist tendencies. Choukini’s style has evolved in a distinctly anti-formalist tradition, in the vein of artists as diverse as Fausto Melotti, Naum Gabo, and Isamu Noguchi, who despite their differences all envisioned sculpture as an organic, open-ended process. Furthermore, these artists—Choukini included—have a certain relationship with the kinetics of the hands and eyes, exploring biological principles of perception and motion above those that might be affected by a computer.
As a true engineer of wood, Choukini manipulates his material into sensuality and circularity,
bridging the gap between order (softness) and disorder (roughness). As a result, his sculptures
express very indirect but nonetheless vivid symbolic force that can only be deciphered from clues such as the titles of his works. They often allude to a certain physical action or function without explicitly depicting it with common codes or images; rather, they invite us to a new realm of communication.
Choukini’s art questions our vision—and the tactile, haptic sense—in a dialectic between
sculptural, landscape, and architectural spaces. Where the sculpture ends, begins a fragment of
landscape... where the landscape ends, begins a fragment of architecture... wherein lies a
fragment of sculpture... over and over again in an open-ended and serendipitous organic process of mise en abîme and inverted/distorted shapes and scales. Hence the eloquent title for this exhibition: Citadelles of Today, in remembrance of West Asian landscapes and traditional
architecture between Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. These are what one could metaphorically call “cities of sand,” often made of ancient bricks and tiles, with an entropic root system in the earth. Both fragile, as they are subject to seismic frequencies, and anti-fragile, as everything comes from dust and to dust returns. Far from proposing closed and definitive patterns inspired from modernist architecture or any kind of bold symbolism, Chaouki Choukini’s artworks seem to follow an almost hidden program or secret battle plan, that of revealing from a buried blueprint, layer by layer, plateau after plateau, in search of spaces to heal.
Morad Montazami, director Zamân Books & Curating, excerpt, “Chaouki Choukini’s healing
spaces”, 2024.Since the late 1960s, Chaouki Choukini has developed an astoundingly consistent aesthetic worldview. His sculptural works, mainly in wood but occasionally in marble or stone, range from horizontal Lieux and Paysages to upright, anthropomorphic, almost totemic figures. At first glance, the works may appear somewhat primitivist. A closer look, however, reveals a sophisticated interrogation of organic and mechanical worlds, where curvaceous mounds are punctuated by a regiment of pegs, or undulating bases bristle with teeth-like crags. Discursively, Choukini layers an eerie latency into his works: mazes of slits, recesses, and multi-level cavities evoke some vanished human presence on the tense horizon line; the ubiquitous “cord” is a taut yet silent marker of dormant sound.
BIO:
Born in 1946 in Choukine, Lebanon, Chaouki Choukini received his degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris in 1972. He was awarded the Prix de la Jeune Sculpture in 1978, followed by the Taylor Foundation Prize in 2010 and the Prix de la Fondation Pierre Gianadda, from de l’Academie des Beaux Arts, France in 2015.
Choukini has participated in various solo and group exhibitions including: Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, Biennale Arte 2024, Venice, Italy (2024); Arab Presences, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, France (2024); L’Almanach 23: Kleinplastik (Abstrakte), Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2023); Drawings, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2023); The Rain Forever Will Be Made of Bullets, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2021); Choukini: 10 Recent Sculptures, Espace Claude Lemand, Paris, France (2020); Chaouki Choukini, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2019); Le monde arabe vu par ses artistes, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France (2018); Beloved Bodies, Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2017), Poetry in Wood, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE, (2016), Portrait de l'Oiseau qui n’existe pas, Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch, France (2014); Tajreed (Arab Abstract Art), Contemporary Art Platform, Kuwait (2013); Le Corps decouvert, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France (2012); International Aswan Sculpture Symposium, Cairo Biennial, Egypt (1997); Paris Sculpture, Centre de Sculpture Contemporaine, Paris, France (1973).