Charbel abou Zeidan

°1978, Beirut, Lebanon.
Lives and works in Kortrijk, Belgium.

Charbel Abou Zeidan works across architecture, fashion, and visual art. Based in Belgium and informed by his Lebanese background, he believes in the power of disciplines enriching each other as interconnected ways of thinking and making.

His multidisciplinary practice stems from studying the old masters: artists who were simultaneously architects, sculptors, painters. He learned their techniques: imprematura, the art of layered form, repetitive meditative strokes. This observation shaped his conviction that to be an artist is to master across disciplines. He is driven by curiosity and hunger to understand multiple techniques and materials. Through this learning, he discovered that mastery reveals essence: the unnecessary falls away.

A principle guides his work: ‘It takes a lot of knowledge to look this simple’. He is drawn to wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence. His minimal aesthetic emerges from rigorous reduction. Through silicone, latex, charcoal, pastel, and paint, and through textiles, cotton and linen, which he stitches and builds into relief and three-dimensional form, he creates conversations between colour and monochrome, plane and volume, the organic and the graphic. His colour work is complex, built methodically from flat surface to sculptural presence.

He highlights what is usually hidden: surged seams, the reverse of canvas, moulding silicone, the marks of making. Beauty lives in these imperfections and mistakes, in the traces that reveal authenticity and the unexpected. This element of surprise invites viewers to encounter what they didn't anticipate, creating appreciation and demanding reconsideration.

Growing up amid war and destruction taught him that chaos and creation are complementary. His work embodies this conviction: perfection and imperfection are inseparable. His work is restrained and precise, beauty exists in what we've been taught to overlook.