Nélida Nassar 05.20.2022
For his current exhibition “Here and Now” at Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Beirut artist Joseph Harb has produced paintings, drawings and sculptures that constitute some of his rawest, most haunting and memorable figurative art to date. White plaster and red clay figures, based on his own body and those of friends, family, and neighbors, are seated or standing, poised or waiting. They are displayed on stools of different styles and heights. Like actors in a play that never starts, these figures inhabit three-dimensional environments that evoke everyday spaces. One can walk around them (which makes the effect all the more eerie) or touch them, but they live in their own universe. It is impossible to warn them that the moment they are waiting for will never arrive. Unlike, say, the 18th century sculptures of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt with their contorted facial expressions, they are expressionless. A few of them have generic facial features; in others the eyes are missing, or the face is blank.
Fragments of the human body inhabit another side of the exhibition space. In this case, the human body has been used as a canvas for all sorts of art, but perhaps more interesting and rare is the use of its parts as artistic media. Made of resin, these molded human fragments range from thumbs, hands, arms and distorted skulls to plasticized fragments in dynamic poses enclosed in glass containers and jars. Harb explores basic existential questions, while seeking to convey, more specifically, the wounded soul of his homeland, Lebanon. A set of paintings of an agonizing but glaring truth completes the exhibition, starting with a shredded breast and followed by a series of charging bulls’ drawings. These tattered beings – these condemned people that we have become following the pandemic, the Beirut harbor blast and the nation’s economic collapse – haunt one painting after another. This anxious imagery is not for the faint hearted. Beyond anxieties, however, the body in fragments also evokes fascination and the ideal of ‘wholeness’; for the artist gives us the opportunity to step outside the fast-paced consumer world in order to get a better look at how we function within it.
Controversial as it is, Harb’s present approach is firmly rooted in historical and contemporary sources. In its focus on death, it hearkens back to the memento mori (reminders of mortality) images in European still life. In using biological materials, he joins other contemporary artists of the late-20th century, among them Robert Rauschenberg, with his taxidermied animals, Carolee Schneemann, who covered herself in raw meat, and Joseph Beuys, who constructed Fat Chair and other sculptures made of fat.
Harb has made human body art that is often controversial and sometimes surprisingly poignant. Is he convincing? In any case he raises some seminal questions.
Galerie Janine Rubeiz
Ground Floor, Majdalani Building., (Banque Audi)
Charles De Gaulle Avenue, Raouche, Beirut
April 20, 2022 – June 1, 2022
https://www.galeriejaninerubeiz.com/
https://www.facebook.com/galeriejaninerubeiz/
https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/?next=/jeanine.rebeiz/
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Xaver_Messerschmidt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rauschenberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beuys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolee_Schneemann
ART & CULTURE TODAY 