As Close As It Gets

To deconstruct, to reconstruct. What Tarek Haddad seeks seems to emerge only through alteration.

He repeatedly works with his images, distorting and transforming them. His view of the world reflects a fragmented biography: Lebanon, departures to France and Finland, both chosen and imposed, and his return.

From these successive displacements, he extracts a photographic material that becomes tangible and open to manipulation. The images themselves become surfaces on which he intervenes methodically. First through observation, which creates doubt: what are we seeing? Are these really landscapes, seas, or mountains? Or are they objects through which he perceives a distant present? Then through addition: a ruler measuring the world and giving it form, stones carefully placed on a print that seems to sink until it merges with its surroundings. Finally, through reorganization: the sea, cubes, and pixels, the microscopic transformed into the monumental.

Tarek Haddad, Nowhere Near #06, 2026 - Courtesy of Galerie Tanit