Ayyam Gallery Beirut presents LOL, the solo show of leading Syrian artist Khaled Takret. Featuring a new series of works, the exhibition will highlight a recent development in Takreti’s painting style as he enters the second phase of his twenty-year oeuvre. Expanding his focus on sociocultural themes, which emerged in his previous body of work, Complete Freedom (2013), his latest paintings employ a new postmodern aesthetic, one that evokes the desensitised, image-saturated age of today.

Deconstructing the formal properties of painting, Takreti sources imagery from a variety of media then creates collaged stencils as outlines for his compositions. Figures and objects are paired with minimal reference to tangible spaces and painted with photographic precision, a breakdown of illusionism that is visible in his earlier works but further reduced in order to allude to the artifice of advertising, social media, and popular culture. Through such formalism, Takreti blurs the line between fine art and mass media and depicts modern life as a tableau of the absurd riddled with anxiety.

In Mis en Plis (2014), for example, what appears to be a magazine spread of a beauty salon is subverted by the placement of a hollow figure whose identity remains invisible. The title of the painting references the process of undergoing a ‘makeover’ yet visibly absent is the body of the lone figure, as clothes stand in for the actual person. Similarly, in 220 Volts (2014) a female protagonist appears taken aback by a stack of outdated electronics, her head depicted as a single stereo speaker.

The satirical nature of the exhibition’s included paintings is alluded to by its title, and culminates with the self-portrait A liaise (2014), which shows the artist at ease in a retro armchair. Takreti’s own image is rendered in the black and white aesthetic of newspaper prints, matching the sense of temporal distance that is communicated in additional works, as a reflection of what art historian Brendan Prendeville describes as the ‘reality as paper thin’ basis for realism in the postmodern era. Although these recent paintings mark a notable departure from the self-reflective portraits of his family and friends for which Takreti is known, he retains an interest in the buried psychology of the everyday.

-Ayyam Gallery Beirut

Image: © Khaled Takreti
Courtesy of the artist and Ayyam Gallery Beirut