Distant Tears

”Have you ever fallen asleep, I mean, have you ever felt that falling sensation?” — Léa Bismuth

    For his first exhibition at Jean-Kenta Gauthier gallery, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros (born in Lebanon in 1981, lives between Paris and Beirut) inserts a tear from each of his eyes into a wall of each gallery, as if to bring both Odéon and Vaugirard spaces closer together and introduce the city of Paris into the work. Entitled Distant Tears (2025), this new work gives its title to the exhibition. For H. Boutros, the exhibition itself often becomes part of the work, as in his film Three Songs, Three Exhibitions (2022), which welcomes visitors to the Vaugirard gallery and paints a metaphorical and musical triple portrait of his three recent exhibitions at Beirut Art Center (Home Works 8, Ashkal Alwan, 2019), S.M.A.K. (Ghent, 2020) and La Criée Centre d'art contemporain (Rennes, 2022), which produced the work.

    H. Boutros also merges days. In Give Today’s Air to Yesterday’s Air (The Kiss) (2024-2025), he blew up a coloured balloon twice: half the day before, half the day of the opening. Resurrecting yesterday's air, bringing a balloon to the mouth like a kiss between two days, celebrating the start of the exhibition, watching the balloon deflate. A diversion from Piero Manzoni's Artist’s Breath (1960)? Night Cartography #4 (2024-2025) is a sheet in which the artist has spent a night and which he has covered the next day with ashes from the day's newspapers. “Night cartographies” form a series of protean works that H. Boutros has been producing for over ten years.

    To coincide with the exhibition, Léa Bismuth* has published a new essay entitled Somewhere, Night. A text inspired by a several nocturnal works by Charbel-joseph H. Boutros. At Vaugirard, H. Boutros has set up a small room with a mattress as an invitation to rest. The gallery team can nap there, surrounded by works (Dream, No. 10 (2024-2025), Mixed Up Dream #5 (2019-2025), If Close to the Sun a Drop May Fall (2019-2025)) that evoke the role of dreams in the artist's production. On the bedside table, a glass of water, but of 27 mineral waters from 27 European countries (DRINK EUROPA, 2012-2013). And a bit of reading: When Two Days Meet (2024-2025) is today's newspaper overlaid with the previous day's edition reduced to ashes; yesterday's news eclipses today’s.

    Odéon is the other small space in the exhibition. Although the tears in Distant Tears (2025) link it to Vaugirard like two lovers, the proposal has its own autonomy. The Most Magical Line in Vermeer's Painting (2024) is a sampling, a single line of neon that, as the title suggests, embodies the entire oeuvre of the Flemish painter. H. Boutros often speaks of a ‘charged abstraction’, a non-figuration that contains several narratives. On the floor, in the sole light of art history, a tiny cube whose inner surfaces are covered with mirrors, invisible to the visitor, collect an infinitely reflected darkness (1 CM3 of Infinite Darkness (2013)). Perhaps another night, this one immensely small.

    Combining new works and recent projects, H. Boutros continues with Distant Tears to compose his works using unexpected elements—dream, sleep, breath, wish or exhibition—which he distils into a variety of everyday materials—sheet, mattress, carpet, ash, balloon, votive wax, water or pills—to interweave intimacy, geography and political history.


— Jean-Kenta Gauthier, January 2025


* Léa Bismuth has a PhD in art theory from EHESS, and is an author, art critic, curator and teacher. In 2024, she published L'art de passer à l'acte [The Art of Taking Action] with Presses Universitaires de France.