An Article by D. M. (688 words, 4 min. read)
At the heart of Beirut, beneath the warm light of the Janine Rubeiz Gallery, three artists reunite a decade after their first collaboration to mark a moment that feels both like an end and a beginning. Gregory Buchakjian, François Sargologo, and Hanibal Srouji come together under a title that echoes through art history with an unsettling resonance: La fin du romantisme—The End of Romanticism.
But how can one mourn the death of a movement that faded centuries ago? Perhaps, the answer lies not in chronology, but in metaphor. Romanticism, with its yearning for the sublime, its devotion to emotion, and its deep entanglement with nature and ruin, is not merely a historical term. It is a way of seeing, a way of feeling. And in this exhibition, it is also a way of mourning—of letting go.
François Sargologo: The Echoes of Nature’s Dream
Sargologo’s photographs do not document nature, they dream it. In lush, saturated scenes of dense foliage and ecstatic bloom, he conjures visions that verge on hallucination. These are not landscapes one visits, but visions that possess the viewer. His images are both hyperreal and unreal, suspended in the timeless fog of a waking dream.
Yet beneath their beauty lies a knowing irony. There is parody in this exaggerated romanticism, a sly nod to the theatricality of a movement once so sincere in its longing. Sargologo pushes romantic aesthetics to their limit, until the line between homage and caricature blurs. His nature is not the nature of Rousseau or Wordsworth. It is an imagined Eden, dazzling and disorienting, haunted by its own excess.
Gregory Buchakjian: The Silence of Ruins
Where Sargologo sings, Buchakjian whispers. His work, austere and nearly monochrome, draws the viewer into a world of architectural ghosts. A single structure—a temple, flattened into abstraction—becomes the quiet center of his composition. From a bird’s-eye perspective, the grandeur of antiquity collapses into lines and shadows, robbed of monumentality.
There is no nostalgia in Buchakjian’s ruins, no pathos. Instead, he gives us the residue of memory, the factual weight of decay. The romantic ruin, once drenched in melancholy and poetic grandeur, is here stripped bare, anonymized by codes and aerial views. It is not beauty he seeks, but the inevitability of erosion. Even his own image disappears, hidden behind the mapped bones of a lost structure. The self dissolves into stone and dust.
Hanibal Srouji: Between Fire and Fragility
And then there is fire. Hanibal Srouji brings a raw, almost sacred energy to the exhibition. His canvases burn—literally. The scars of flame mark the surface of his works, as if memory itself had been singed. The vibrant colors of some pieces suggest a seascape or a sky at twilight, but others are ash-gray, brittle, as if they might crumble under a sigh. There is tension in his practice between beauty and destruction, between the impulse to soothe and the need to bear witness. His art is born of exile, displacement, and survival. It is a romanticism of loss—a yearning not for love or landscape, but for belonging. The fire he wields is not only a tool, it is history, trauma, resistance.
Romanticism Reborn or Truly Ended?
These three artists, though vastly different in style and substance, converge on a shared meditation: What remains of Romanticism today? Is it a relic of the past, a lens through which we once viewed the world with wonder and terror? Or is it a language we still speak—knowingly, awkwardly, even ironically—as we walk through the ruins of our present?
La fin du romantisme is not a eulogy. It is a reflection, an echo, perhaps even a warning. Romanticism, like nature, ruin, and memory, never truly dies. It smolders beneath the surface, flaring up in times of crisis, reminding us that beauty can be found even in the broken, that longing is a form of truth, and that the end of one era is often the beginning of another.
La fin du romantisme
On view at Janine Rubeiz Gallery, Beirut
Until May 30, 2025
