Jean-Luc Moulène

In 2001, the French artist Jean-Luc Moulène took a series of photographs in the Lebanese port city of Sidon, which included portraits of people he met there by chance or through friends. The resulting images were displayed on the crumbling facades of the old souk. Twelve years later, many of them are still there. One portrait in particular, titled Abou Baker, 2001, after its subject, was later borrowed by mourners for the young man’s funeral. For Moulène’s illuminating, inscrutable exhibition at the Beirut Art Center, Abou Baker and another picture from the same series—featuring three bare-chested young men, all tattoos, charm, and tender affection—are placed at the top of an industrial stairwell. They are the only clear link between artist and place. The rest of the show revels in shadows and echoes, which move and multiply among the objects, photographs, drawings, videos, and architectural installations on view.

With forty works arranged into four sections, “Jean-Luc Moulène—Works” loops around the center like a sequence of strange and compelling riddles, from a skull cased in concrete (Arthur, 2010) and a haphazard chunk of plywood (Alexandria Made, 1997) to a suite of ink drawings disguised as monochromatic paintings (4 Bic Drawings, 2013). Categories fall into disarray as Moulène collapses conventional understandings of what constitutes an image, an object, or a mode of communicating the meaning and status of one as the other.

Wrapping around the main hall are two fantastic L-beams—one red, one blue—that bifurcate the space. Produced in Beirut and commissioned for the exhibition, the steel structures, when viewed from above, form two rectangles bolted on top of one another but shifted slightly apart. Together, they are called debrayeur, French for “disengage” but also the word for a clutch pedal, itself an apt metaphor for Moulène’s practice as a mechanism that controls how two things moving at potentially different speeds connect and decouple, if and when needed.