SOLO EXHIBITION AT TETOKA GALLERY (TOKYO,JP) FROM FEB.3rd TO FEB.19th 2023
—
“One does not practice collage without a certain taste for chaos and harshness.
The unexpected beauty that we might expect from the mix of two images or discontinuous forms, necessarily results from a shock, with a form of violence.

It takes the restraint and determination, the meditative and hedonistic character of Alex Besikian to dress up this initial violence with elegance and visual refinement. "To dress" or "to cover", "to conceal" are some of the words that come to face with the new series of images that he exhibits,
and whose title of the first, "Natural Screen», gives the clue.

In some of these images, we think we first recognize a hidden window or the frame of an upturned canvas.
In others the patterns of camouflage. If you look more closely, you can indeed distinguish solid colors arranged with quasi-patterns, but which are all scrambling systems.
And already, the first analogies have disappeared. Gone, really ? Let's say they left room for doubt.
What are we really looking at ? Images in the making ? Images being destroyed ? Simple ranges of "colors in a certain order put together » ? Should we pay attention to surfaces?
Wouldn't it be better to explore their outlines? The overview escapes. However, it is not for lack of being firmly established, of asserting oneself without detour.

Like a celebrity's sunglasses, Alex Besikian's images actually show everything they want to hide: from intricate, long and carefully crafted photomontages made from photographs of traces & imprints (scotch tape, peeling paint on a wall, broken shop windows, etc.). These images proceed from successive coverings and erasures, deletions, withdrawals. Alex Besikian's colored surfaces are empty screens that mask missing parts.
On the "Foreshadows" series, as the title suggests, Besikian worked from photographs of shadows cast by objects or cast on surfaces - photographs taken by himself which he combined together but remain invisible to the public.

The emptiness of the colored flat areas, as well as the tears that seam them, is even more affirmed in "Foreshadows" than in "Natural Screen ».
As if emptiness and color had combined to escape the lines and the drawing which, in "Natural Screen", continues to hold the composition.

Privilege of the shadow to remain elusive, to flee those who seek to seize it, to project, to cover without canceling, to tint without materiality. Privilege and greatness of the art of Alex Besikian to compete with the shadow, to express what is not, to give shapes and colors to what is missing.”

— Laurent Bruel (Editions Matière)