dreamboy
Solo exhibition by Tarek Lakhrissi
3 October - 5 November 2026
Exhibition text by Sif Lindblad
I first came across the work of Tarek Lakhrissi in a group show at Maison Populaire in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, in 2020. I'm from nowhere good, it was called, and considered queer artistic practices as political propositions that might allow for other potential futures. I remember walking through the exhibition with a feeling of having caught a glimpse of what was to come. Like this was the way forward for the world, to become a bit more strange, tender, funny. It offered an invitation to share in some of the tools and practices that have come to be known as queer. Which is to say that there are ways of imagining and inhabiting the world otherwise.
This is, in many ways, what I continue to recognize in Tarek Lakhrissi's work.
dreamboy is the artist's first show in Denmark, and thereby also a step onto unknown ground. Even more so because it is the first time Lakhrissi is showing a larger series of his drawings. Returning to drawing after giving it up as a teenager-when drawing, for a boy, was associated with something he was then meant to feel ashamed of-means returning to something he loves.
His dreamboy drawings hold pride and a love for youth, pleasure and fairy-tale-like happy endings. They are populated by different versions of the dreamboy: men, monsters, lovers, happy devils, characters that seem to evolve from one drawing to the next, like a Pokémon developing through different stages, moving freely between the everyday, images found on Tumblr and references to art history and pop culture.
Those in the first room are all portraits, a new dreamboy daydreaming in his own private space. The perspective is slightly off, and the boys all pose in different ways, doing their own thing, as if we were secretly peeking in on them or looking at a still from a movie. They all look gentle, put together, just doing their (weird) thing. In the second room, the drawings, and the dreamboys inhabiting them, become more quirky, dreamy, kinky. I've seen that face before leans towards the almost surreal, a flicker of unconscious scenes that appear in the depths of sleep. A paper cut-out with a hand holding a peach or an apple seems loaded with references: still-life painting, religious temptation, the peach that loses its innocence in Call Me by Your Name. In Orgies and comets, a sphinx-like pose nods to archaic art-historical imagery, alongside symbols including the Nike icon, whose particular ambivalence and idiosyncrasy seem to be a recurring fascination for Lakhrissi, its swoosh appearing in several of the drawings.
When he gave up drawing, he turned to basketball instead, something more boyish (where you get to wear Nikes). The swoosh that sits on the sneakers beneath a pair of butt cheeks in these bitches want nikes-referencing the first lyric in Frank Ocean's now-infamous Nikes-brings together the different worlds that co-exist in his practice and life: the art-historical, the pop-cultural, the erotic, the boyish. Returning to drawing, Lakhrissi lingers in these co-existing worlds a little longer, allowing them to overlap and collide in ways that are more contemplative, without losing their humor or sensitivity.
In the video work Bright Heart (2023), Lakhrissi too takes familiar worlds and turns them slightly strange. The scene unfolds in and around the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, where a young brown boy, seeking somewhere to hide, finds the door to the museum almost magically open. Suspended between dream and consciousness, the museum becomes more than a backdrop: a strange and shifting character, sometimes violent, sometimes sanctuary-like, where encounters between past and present, inner turmoil and the outside gaze meet. A phone call becomes an intimate moment of loneliness, a dinosaur becomes a person of desire (and target of love), while two good-looking vampire witches recite decolonial books in the back of the museum.
The work moves between the everyday experience of being a young brown queer boy in an institutional landscape and references drawn from art history, fairy tales and '90s TV series. Felix Gonzalez-Torres's iconic work Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), where a male dancer appears alone on a raised platform, performing for an absent and anonymous audience, is another reference. Art historian Josh T. Franco writes about the strange tensions between wanting "to be and be with" the body of the dancer in Gonzalez-Torres's work: how desire becomes entangled with identification, envy, comparison and the fear of rejection, and with the question of what it means to encounter oneself within an art world where certain desires and ways of being have historically been made more visible, desirable and possible than others.
In Bright Heart, however, desire finds its own way through an encounter between two bodies-two versions of the dreamboy-dancing in a perfectly clichéd moonlit scene amidst the museum's collection of objects and forms of knowledge. Here, the museum becomes a sanctuary rather than a place that tells you how things are meant to be. As such, Lakhrissi twists the bourgeois codes of the art world and makes room for another way of looking, shaped by desire rather than convention.
Lakhrissi's work does not offer another world. It makes the one we are already in feel slightly less fixed and slightly more possible.