Chaos Art Gallery has recently announced the opening of Micro-Organisms, Edouard Souhaid’s first solo exhibition in Beirut, from June 6 until June 20. The artwork explores biomorphic aesthetics and colorful compositions, merging art and science in a vivid display of rhythm and movement.
Micro-organisms, Edouard Souhaid’s solo exhibition at Chaos Art Gallery, explores biomorphic aesthetics and colorful compositions, merging art and science in a lively presentation of rhythm and movement. The artist delves into the infinitely small, aiming to capture rhythm and bodily engagement in his work.
Edouard Souhaid, based in Paris since 2015, is a graduate of the École Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA) and holds a Master 2 from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de la Villette (ENSA-LV). His interdisciplinary practice includes drawing, painting, and sculpture, with a focus on rhythm, movement, and color. He employs various techniques and surfaces, including canvas and wood, and has ventured into 3D sculpture using innovative 3D printing techniques. Edouard Souhaid has significantly contributed to the Lebanese cultural landscape by co-founding MINAB and the Collective for Architecture in Lebanon. These initiatives facilitate interdisciplinary discussions around architecture, design, urban planning, and the humanities in the Arab world. His abstract works have been exhibited in prestigious venues, such as the Beit Beirut Museum, Ho Chi Minh City, and Paris.
Within this exhibition, one discovers Edouard Souhaid’s abstract formal vocabulary. It includes dots, spots, drops, and overlays that follow a visual logic governed by color. “Spontaneously, one form calls another and responds to the next,” explains the artist. His work seeks rhythm in movement through fluid, almost automatic gestures, creating recognizable cellular figures with vibrant colors and a profusion of details.
From the infinitely large to the infinitely small, the artist’s work transforms objects seen from afar into dots and objects seen up close into bacteria, cells, and organic forms. Close to a molecular aesthetic, Edouard Souhaid explores the intimate territory, offering a subjective and dreamlike vision of the billions of cells and various organisms that compose our bodies.
Dense and dynamic, his compositions revolve around imaginary landscapes. Flexible patches extend with equal attention to large spaces and the regions that compose them. His territories, seen from the sky and treated as maps, reflect the complexity of human structures. It is as if we are looking inside human bodies through tools, as abstraction involves seeing something very closely or from very far away.
Edouard Souhaid’s practice is transversal, working with the flatness of the canvas in relief, which naturally leads him to work in bas-relief on wood and then to 3D sculpture. These works, like wall appliqués or painting-objects, show the continuity of his research across different media. Inspired by Kandinsky for his attention to detail, Frank Stella for his movement, and Jean Arp for creating a simple formal system resonating with harmony, the artist is also interested in the movement of American abstract expressionism for its sense of rhythm and bodily involvement in the work.