Christopher Rizkallah

(b.1993) graduated from the American University of Beirut with a BA in Studio Arts and Media Communications in 2014. As an emerging multidisciplinary artist, he has been a part of several group shows. His work is both digital and analogue, often playing between the two. His work was acquired in 2018 by the Luciano Benetton Collection as part of the Imago Mundi publication on Lebanon  and was most recently exhibited in the 9th edition of Beirut Art Fair. 

 AFTERTASTE
Christopher Rizkallah’s mouth is the primary subject of his series of oil paintings in his solo exhibition Aftertaste. Largely autobiographical, the paintings depict beautiful and profane oral movements that reference digital images taken by the artist. In playing with and distorting the images, he explores details behind the mouth’s daily acts.

The paintings depict Rizkallah’s everyday ritualistic actions that involve his lips and tongue. He digitally documents fundamental nuances in their movements, exploring for instance the minute muscular contractions can affect the sincerity of a smile, or the multitude of combinations they produce during the act of speaking. Normally discarded as false representations of the subject, the errors of a computer in digital processing are the omitted acts the artist captures in his paintings.

Painting movements that are normally too fast for the eye to contemplate, the resulting image of the digital self-portraits highlight the micro-expressions that communicate people’s thoughts through their most direct way of expressing them. These glitches that, frozen in time by the paintings, cloud the line between human and technological errors of depiction.