Fares Cachoux

Jerusalem Queen
2022

© Adagp, Paris, 2023

Details

In his series Queens, Fares Cachoux pays homage to the women of the Middle East and Arab World with their suffering due to unjust laws, wars, or even the degradation of the environment in the region. Each queen, like every single Middle Eastern woman, is different: in her appearance, religion, attributes, color palette, and feelings. By representing the diversity of female experiences who live in the same region Cachoux destroys the unified stereotypical image of Arab women in the West. Nonetheless, the artist also stresses out the importance of their unity in their connection to their environment as each of the queens could be mother earth.

Born in Homs, Syria, in 1976, Fares Cachoux studied computer engineering at the University of Aleppo, before doing his master's and doctorate in digital art and visual communication in Paris. After a ten-year stint in the Gulf, where he worked for various museums, he decided to dedicate himself definitively to art and settled back in France in 2021.

Cachoux's works tell stories using a visual vocabulary reduced to the essentials. From the war in Syria to those drowned in the Mediterranean, from the complexity of social customs in the Gulf to political caricatures, from the fragility of our democratic societies to the depletion of our environmental resources, each of his works is the reduction of an event, a situation, to its very quintessence.

A committed artist, he knows how to reach a very wide audience with simple, transparent messages. As he puts it, ‘That's where the enigma lies! You have to summarise complex events with a minimum of elements, without losing the meaning’. With a bold, minimalist style, bright colours and simple silhouettes, Cachoux puts his work at the service of freedom and human dignity.

Cachoux held his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2015, after being invited by Banksy to take part in the Dismaland exhibition (UK). Today, his work is regularly published in French and foreign newspapers such as Le Monde, Le Temps, Courrier International and the Huffington Post. His work also features in the French school curriculum and is used to teach children how to decipher political posters.

Other artworks from Fares Cachoux