At the boundary between photography and painting, Serge Najjar creates a universe where man merges with the geometry of the world. Presented by Galerie Bessières at Menart Fair 2025, his work captures that fragile moment when light becomes thought and shadow, breath.
From his native Beirut, Serge Najjar explores the lines and volumes of everyday life with the rigor of an architect and the sensitivity of a poet. His camera becomes a compass, his light, a guide. For him, the image is never pure representation, but rather a tension: that of reality captured on the edge of abstraction. Shaped by the modern gaze, nourished by the works of the Russian avant-garde and the legacy of Malevich, Najjar transforms the city into an atlas of planes and voids, where humanity appears only as a witness to the scale of the world.
His photographs, printed on aluminum like icons of suspended time, reveal a keen sense of silence and rhythm. Cuts ou Where Darkness BreaksHe captures the pivotal moment: the moment when light sculpts matter before fading away, when shadow advances and gives form its density. His entire body of work explores this fraction of a second during which time stands still, this moment when the photographic act becomes meditation.
Winner of the Photomed Prize and the JP Morgan Chase – Paris Photo Prize, Najjar has exhibited in Beirut, Munich, Chicago, and Paris, weaving a body of work that is both intimate and universal. His gaze, with its almost musical precision, revisits modernity by stripping it of its tumult. He reveals what the city conceals: a poetry of concrete, a choreography of angles and breaths, a way of inhabiting light.
At Menart Fair 2025, his solo show with Galerie Bessières confirms the understated power of a photographer who creates a dialogue between architecture and soul. By redefining the boundaries between painting and photography, Serge Najjar invents a space where rigor becomes emotion, and where each patiently crafted image becomes a fragment of silence to contemplate.
