With an extraordinary sharpness of eye, Serge Najjar manages to sublimate his photographs taken on the Lebanese shipyards into true paintings echoing the great masters of geometric abstract painting such as Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Bridget Riley or Aurélie Nemours.

In doing so, he offers us an atypical vision of Lebanon, far from the picturesque old stones so often associated with Lebanese heritage.

Serge Najjar, born in Beirut in 1973, on the eve of the civil war, is a photographer whose rapid and immense notoriety is the result of social networks. He will be known as "serjios" on Instagram. Largely self-taught, he first worked with his smartphone before turning to film photography. In 2011, he was nominated for the Prix Pictet for a photograph taken with his mobile phone. He then won the Photomed prize in 2014.
Serge Najjar’s predilection for concrete, an unloved material, a sign of unplanned urbanization, can be surprising. However, only concrete makes possible the most daring lines, textures and the most varied colors. The eye gets lost in almost unreal surfaces that cut through space with graphic precision. Is it a photograph or a painting? We approach to understand what we see, we hesitate: angles, lines, colors, textures, superpositions make up the abstraction. It’s a photograph.
Facing his lens, the walls whose irregularities he does not hide seem to carry within them living canvases. We read there the greatest abstract and constructivist artists of the 20th century. But be careful, Najjar reveals without ever being inspired. The clairvoyance of his gaze is all the more striking because he never stages his subjects and never retouches his shots. It only reveals what the eager eye cannot see, what Henri Cartier Bresson, whom he admires, called "the decisive moment". When a worker passes through the frame, he will be part of the composition. His gaze allows us to revisit our contemporary world on the scale of men, who appear and humanize architectures.
Serge Najjar is in the lineage of aesthete photographer artists, from Man Ray to Lucien Clergue, who print their marks attesting to an artistic intention. So that his photographs are never a reproduction of reality but its exact opposite.
In a country marked by war, these photographs take on a symbolic and political dimension. Between construction, destruction and reconstruction, Lebanon is constantly reinventing itself after each injury. The buildings of Najjar also tell a story about a country that continually rises again. Each photograph then becomes a fragile suspension between two states: destruction and promise.