Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Paris

"When I was younger, I used to go to my grandfather's house during school holidays in a village called Choukine in the south of Lebanon, where I would contemplate mountains, trees, valleys, wells — unlike the views of Beirut. This led me to develop my love of nature, which influences my work. My expression of a landscape is not an exact representation of nature — I'm turning it into something metaphysical, imaginary and with an element of mystique."

- Chaouki Choukini


"This Lebanese artist arrived in France directly from his vil­lage in South Lebanon. At the time, he carved strange, imag­i­nary and soberly baroque con­struc­tions in wood. The formal evi­dence, on the bor­der­line with fan­tasy, imposed itself: these sculp­tures simul­ta­ne­ously appear as irra­tional mon­u­ments, checker­boards for games of chance, fig­ures that are inter­locked and involved with a sort of big meta­phys­ical game.

Since then, Choukini has divested him­self to the advan­tage of curves and sur­face planes. He uses the mate­rial as a key­board and extracts from it pow­erful and del­i­cate formal com­po­si­tions on which are dis­played a fig­ural sug­ges­tion, almost at the second degree. The word 'key­board' is even more so appro­priate here as it also trans­lates the sought after and achieved effect, that of music, which is simple and pure sim­ilar to a melody, yet some­times more com­plex and almost like an orchestra. The mute music pre­sent in Choukini's sculp­tures is a chal­lenge to the absurd canon that fatally shoots here and there to kill, without suc­ceeding, Lebanon's soul and body, which stands like a strong and tender moun­tain, just like the sculp­tures and sculptor I have here men­tioned.

After forty years of career as a sculptor, Chaouki Choukini has always remained true to him­self. This man who came from Lebanon, a country of rocks and sun, always pays close atten­tion to the sin­cerity of objects and shapes, some­times giving pri­ority to the music of the mate­rial, other times to objec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion. This inge­nious bal­ance makes each and every one of Choukini's cre­ations quake with emo­tion. Choukini's sculp­ture reveals the poetic, yet often so tragic, strangeness of our con­di­tion."

- Salah Stetie