Serge Najjar Lines, within & A closer look at the ordinary
BIOGRAPHY Serge Najjar was born in Beirut. He is a practicing lawyer and doctor at law. He started publishing his photographs on Instagram in 2011 (@serjios) and became an overnight success. He was immediately contacted by many galleries and started exhibiting Lines,Within at Tanit Gallery (Munich - Beirut) in 2012. He is the Laureate winner of Photomed 2014. His works are today exhibited in international fairs.
Interview with Serge Najjar at the Photomed festival 2014. Béatrice Lagarde
Lines, Within. 2012 I was taken by an unexpected passion for photography three years ago, my interest grew for architecture; that created by Man, the other drawn through lines and light. Living in Beirut raises challenges and suspicions. Reassuring the inhabitant that I am neither a terrorist nor a spy, meaning no harm, is a constant concern. I have to act efficiently and manage with what is present on sight by trying, when possible, to incorporate the human presence in my pictures. This «duel» and the complicity between Man and architecture is interesting because a human being in a picture brings at the same time warmth and scale. This gives, in its turn, an abstract dimension to Man. My aim in photography is to get as close as I can to abstraction. To draw with my camera the way we draw with a brush; seeing objects the way I want them to appear and not the way they actually are. I try to recompose, restructure what I see; my eye constructs reality by transforming it. I grew up with the privilege of being able to read auction catalogues and books on modern and contemporary art. I was never really interested in photography until one day I found myself signed up for a photography class without my prior knowledge. This is when I realised that my eye had learnt to compose. The technique I learned was important but the work of composition came instinctively. I always try to create with what lies before my eyes. Each vision becomes an artistic challenge. The eye listens. It reconstructs what it sees and a new world can be born at every blink of the eye. Serge Najjar PHOTOMED-BEYROUTH, January 2014
Alphaville. 80 cm x 110 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP
Cutting edge. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP
Road to power. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP
Zebra Path. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP Black Starbust. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP The traveler in me. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP V. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP
Angular Monumentum. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP
White staircase. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP
A crack. 70 cm x 70 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP
A closer look at the ordinary. 2016 Serge Najjar s approach to photography is intuitive. It derives from his passion for modern and contemporary art. He easily references Kazimir Malevich s Architectons, Josef Albers abstract compositions, Robert Mangold and Ellsworth Kelly, and also Lygia Clark, Aurélie Nemours, Frank Stella and Sol Lewitt. The graphic approach of the Russian Avant-garde and, specifically, Alexander Rodchenko catches Najjar s interest early on his career: deciphering the image and its construction will come to guide the structure of his future endeavours. Serge Najjar s pictures place the viewer within a world where reality and fantasy meet. They capture the passing of time, or a space where the transient disposition of man would inhabit ideal radical constructions. Motionless variations on a theme, the photographs engage in a dialogue, complete each other or not, but always create a singular space that is inhabited by the onlooker within the space they are presented in. In a sort of backward movement, Najjar uses photography in the digital age while adhering to an approach that embraces the formal rigour better known from analog photography. Always on foot across the city, the photographer tracks down architecture, surfaces and ordinary shapes which when seen from unusual angles appear as surreal figures. One click and the concert of the outdoors is frozen into evidence. Shadow and light, passerby, subject, worker; thus architecture and man stay on the edge of abstraction. This is where we find the formal language of the photographer. By appropriating the principles of capture of immediate reality, where direct photography is only possible thanks to the distance of the subject, and the photographer too. Whether colour or black and white photographs, Najjar s body of images forms a coherent sum that emerges instantly, without mediation, as a dance between flatness and depth. Careful, calm, without outcry, the photographer plays with elements that are readily available. Shadows become geometric sculptures; three dimensional shapes morph into planes. Perspectives tilt, the image is constructed, reality is cut, riffled through and rebuilt by the lines that surround us.
Red swipe. 100 cm x 100 cm. Edition of 5 + 2AP
Soul of the visible, 70 x 70 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP
Walking on a living canvas 2, 143x110cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP
Shape in square - Ode to Malevitch, 100x100cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP
Red brick conversation, 100 x 100 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP Trinity, 50 x 50 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP Heartbeat, 70 x 70 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP Galaxy, 100 x 100 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP
Chess pawn, 70 x 87.5 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP Man between lines, 70 x 87.5 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP
Paper clip, 100 x 100 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP
Missing triangle, 100 x 150 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP
Through the lines, 100 x 100 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP Trinity, 50 x 50 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP Heartbeat, 70 x 70 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP Galaxy, 100 x 100 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP
Istallation shots. Tanit Gallery Beirut. 2016