Profoundly inflected by specific theoretical endeavors, Bassam Geinati's work, spanning across different symbolic orders and layers of representation, is an on-going investigation of materiality and surface. An oscillation, sometimes pictorial and sometimes sculptural, allows objects to retain their own material properties even as they are being transformed and synthesized on the canvas into different organic arrangements. A general idea of equilibrium, inherited here not from mysticism but from the skepticism of science, unleashes centrifugal and centripetal forces that through motion, speed and rest, at different intervals, allow the world to remain fluid but yet fully formed. Fascinated by the scientist Leon Foucault's 'pendulum' and his empirical demonstration of the earth's rotation, Geitani takes on the mechanism's internal dynamic as an observation point. In this open field he does not restrain his own material which is allowed to fluctuate in any direction. Multi-sourced from the porous materiality of the everyday, Geitani's canvases are a tissue ready to absorb the sounds and pulsations of the immediate environment. The geometrical shapes are not haphazard: They're the result of visual investigations on the nature of living space.
Born in 1962 in Lebanon, Bassam Geitani holds a Master’s degree in Art from the University of Paris I-Sorbonne. After having lived in Paris for fourteen years, he returned to his home country of Lebanon where he currently resides. He teaches Fine Art at the Lebanese American University. Geitani’s practice spans across painting, installation, film and performance.
