Syrian artist Khaled Takreti has spent the greater part of his twenty-year career exploring a personal history that stretches between Beirut, where he was born in 1964; Damascus, where he lived before moving to the United States in his early thirties; and Paris, where he has resided since 2004. The episodic nature of the painter’s oeuvre dates back to the 1990s, when he began to address self-reflexive themes through autobiographical composites. The culled figures of his canvases are based on his family and friends, and often include self-portraits; otherwise, fictionalized moments allude to exhumed apprehension or desire.
As protagonists and objects recur from one series to the next, Takreti seeks to unearth the psychological substrata that cement his connections to them, an approach that probes the fundamental constructs of social institutions by revealing the instability of the familiar. This conceptual strategy has constituted the basis of his art since 1995, when he overcame a period of debilitating grief through painting. The early works on paper created that year mark the start of a long cognitive passage, one that reached its creative terminus with the 2010 painting Generation. Through a series of portraits, the three-panel mural maps the familial links and inherited traits that molded his character from a young age. Although brought together, they are placed at different points of spatial depth within the composition, each indicating different temporalities.
Takreti renders his subject matter with the stillness of photographic imagery in artificial spaces where interplays between color, patterned ornamentation, and hard-edge lines stand in for absent narration. Such pictorial ambiguity displaces the veracity associated with realism, allowing the artist to mine the cavities of experience where memory takes over and visions of the everyday stand in for the subconscious. Objects enter his compositions as recovered forms, metaphysical access points. This perceptive intimacy is initially subjective, rooted in the flux of recollection and the structures of memoir, yet Takreti’s “Pop-stance” painting style, with which references to time are made visible, establishes his works as reflective of modern life.