François Sargologo

About his work:

Far-away is often times the most positive association of nearness. That is the case of Francois Sargologo, whose entire body of work gravitates around this circle of precarious possibilities that is Beirut, his hometown experienced from exile. His photography from the war, poetic iterance of a world both imagined and lost, is embedded in a sober lyric environments, almost whimsical; it is a distant allegories. The minimal vocabulary articulates a search for language in a world of alienation, and the need for objects to appear torn off from their original context reveals everyday significance: The continuity of life as transience and memory. Sargologo's preoccupation with still lifes is not a simple structural dynamic of objects, but a reordering of space in general. The artist attempts to create a gap through which submerged narratives can rise temporarily and shed light on the sphere of the social and the political. Photographic and textual mimesis become invasive and capture the condition of a ruin still open and fresh. Constructed always through double distance, the effect of the work is not optical but one of reverberation. The signified is always apparently lost, but a dim light is always titillating somewhere, drawing a gaze from elsewhere, thrown upon a new field of meaning.

Biography:

François Sargologo was born in Lebanon in 1955, he lives and works in Paris.

He received his fine art degree in Italy in 1977 and worked as a freelancer designer beween Italy, France and Beirut. 

From 1981 to 1989, he taught photography and advertising at the Beirut University College, now renamed Lebanese American University.
While at LAU, Sargologo held an assistant professorship and went on to become an art director in a major advertising company in France between 1990 and 1994.

As an interdisciplinary artist, his work spans across painting, photography and installation.

Publications on his work have debuted in France, Italy, and Lebanon. Sargologo has held different solo and group exhibitions with Galerie Janine Rubeiz: “Gravures récentes” (1994), an exhibition with his mother the artist Yvette Achkar in 2009, and the group exhibitions "Pellicula" (2013) and “Clin d’oeil” (2014).
Sargologo was awarded the European Print Award of excellence in London.