The work of Jean Boghossian is formed from one of the humblest, simplest of actions, the spark of a flame, yet also one of the most important in human history. Both humble and profound, the use of fire speaks to the power of a simple gesture to transform material as well as to a personal curiosity about the process of burning, of transformation. However significant, the flame is only a part of this story, and also at play are colour, texture, a volcanic eruption, a cedar, the simple rhythm of bones emerging, or the glitch in the machine, a challenge to an established order.
Boghossian’s ‘fire dance’, as he has termed it, is a delicate search for balance within chaos, the transformation of surface through attention, skill and care, the humble and violent fire representing both sides of life, and of humanity.
Boghossian’s forthcoming exhibition at Saleh Barakat Gallery draws together painting, wood sculptures and ceramics. Materials such as oil, pigments, smoke, ashes, paper, wood, clay and acrylic are combined with techniques including folding and collage to combine with fire. Tending increasingly toward abstraction, there is an organic movement to his explorations in ceramics, which he has undertaken over the last eight years, a material with a natural relationship with the flame, kiln, oven, the clay becoming hard, brittle, stable under its heat. In all of his material explorations there is density, depth, sensitivity and thickness, crackling, cracking, marbling, surface.
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Boitsfort and Uccle while continuing his involvement in the jewelry trade.
Boghossian has exhibited widely, including representing Armenia at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Recent exhibitions have taken place in Korea, Lebanon, Monaco, Italy, Belgium and Qatar. His last solo exhibition was held at Anima Gallery in Doha, Qata, in 2024.
Through his unique use of fire, he continues to explore contemporary themes, establishing himself as a significant figure in today’s art world.
Sweet Dust explores the intimate geography of memory and interiority, treating fragmented perceptions, emotional residues, and everyday traces as the fundamental material of consciousness. Rather than representing reality, the works transform these fragments into a fluid psychological space where memory, dream, loss, and resilience coexist. At the heart of this process is the artist’s gaze, not as a passive act of looking, but as a means of extracting, transforming, and giving form to what ordinarily escapes representation. Contemporary art has long confronted this fundamental question: how can one give form to that which, by its very nature, eludes it? How can the trajectory of a thought, the retinal persistence of a memory, or the evanescent texture of a dream be made visible? Through saturated fields of color that reject illusionistic depth, the works create a psychological rather than spatial depth, becoming surfaces onto which mental images and emotions can be projected. They materialize the space between what is seen and what remains latent, remembered, or imagined, between the clarity of an emotion and the disappearance of the event that gave rise to it. At the same time, they ask what remains of our experiences when memory is reduced to fragile traces, between dust and electrical impulses, in the digital and posthuman era. The artwork thus becomes both a receptacle and a site of transformation, where the artist’s gaze meets the viewer’s own memories, allowing what has been lost, fragmented, or forgotten to take on another form.
In her practice she uses photography, painting, and ceramics.
