THIS WORK CARRIES NO MEANING
Cette oeuvre n’a aucun sens
هذا العمل لا يحمل أي معنى
- Mahdi BARAghiti -
Curated by Horya Makhlouf
30.01 – 28.02.2026
Flowers are a recurring motif in Mahdi Baraghithi’s work. They appear in plastic or sequins, rendered in painting, drawing, or photography. At times fragile, hesitant, picked on the fly; at others flashy, deceptive, installed in the urgency of a forced departure. They call to mind the homes his family and he were forced to leave behind, and line the dreams of prisoners unjustly confined. They sometimes accompany the dead to their final resting place and continue to grow above them once time has passed. Here, they encircle the green square set up by the performer for dancing; there, they brighten the horizons unfolded by the painter in order to escape. They burst forth in blood-red hues against the surrounding green, only to soon wither beneath skies pierced by no sun. Artists once had the habit of making their colors speak, letting petals bloom and florations sing: what can they possibly still mean when nothing carries any meaning anymore?
Forced into a new exile in October 2023, Mahdi Baraghithi returned to live in France, where he had studied several years earlier. A hasty departure, asylum granted, a dreamed-of escape: the artist finds doors wide open and walls impossible to cross. He receives as many invitations as withdrawals, learns French to the rhythm of apologies, of “it’s too complicated” and “you can’t talk about genocide. ” Before his eyes, and those of the world, images nonetheless continue to scroll uninterrupted. They broadcast live fragments of bodies, rubble, explosions, displacements, uprootings, screams, tears, sobbing, nightmares that swallow reality. The catastrophe. The unspeakable and the unnameable are given forms that are impossible to look at.
What can images still say when nothing carries any meaning anymore?
When he was younger, Mahdi Baraghithi painted. Because it was chic. Because it was beautiful. Because it was what the artists around him did. Returning to painting today means summoning a lost age, though never entirely golden. It means reconnecting with a long duration: that of the great tradition of Palestinian painting, whose chapters, painted between two catastrophes, aspire to continuity. It means safeguarding the land that others ceaselessly seek to tear away. It means cultivating flowers that are prevented from germinating. It means speaking the emptiness of words while continuing to hope. It means aspiring to a thwarted eternity. With his brushes, his colors, his thick impastos, the artist brings into being the space he has never yet been able to access: the space in which to breathe at last, to dream a little, to sleep— forever? To close one’s eyes, find—or re-find—sleep, escape through dreaming, and restore dignity to bodies.
The men he paints are icons. They are bodies that painting tends to and to which it restores poetry. “The Sleeper in the Valley,” whom the painter implores nature to “rock warmly. ” Like Rimbaud’s sleeper, they smile “ as a sick child would smile.” Like Darwich’s dreamer, they proclaim, in their minds and to the world: “Take the roses of our dreams so you may see what joy we see!” And the flowers grow back. They were seeds meant to make no meaning bloom—and all meanings bloom at once. They carry no meaning, and yet carry all meanings at once.
- Horya Makhlouf