Lebanese painter Aref El-Rayess’ daughter pays tribute to her late father in retrospective exhibition
DUBAI: For Hala El-Rayess, the second had lastly come. For years, she had tried to prepare a complete exhibition paying tribute to her late father, the prolific Lebanese modernist Aref El-Rayess, who died in 2005. And in late 2021, such a present was held at Beirut’s Sfeir-Semler Gallery, displaying the artist’s various physique of labor; together with work, sculptures and collages.
“I bear in mind strolling in on the opening and standing there wanting on the artworks. Tears simply began working down my face. . . it was very emotional,” El-Rayess, the founding father of the Aref El-Rayess Basis, tells Arab Information from her base in London. The exhibition, that includes works from 5 a long time of her father’s artistry, has now travelled to the United Arab Emirates and is being hosted by the Sharjah Artwork Museum, in collaboration with Sharjah Artwork Basis, till August 7.
“Seeing it in Sharjah — at an establishment, not a gallery — was a really pleased second for me. ‘I’ve executed it, in spite of everything these years,’” says El Rayess. “And the area is so lovely and enhances the work so properly.”
She remembers a childhood perfumed by turpentine in her playful father’s atelier in Saudi Arabia within the Eighties. “I’d stroll in and the odor was so sturdy, I feel I used to be round 5 or 6 then. It brings again heat recollections of pleased childhood days. One of many issues that used to drive my mum loopy was that she’d bathe me, get me all dressed up, and able to exit, then she’d discover me protecting myself in paint, from prime to backside. That was my dad — simply letting me play,” she says.
However beneath the jokester persona lay a deeply political artist, whose work mirrored troubled instances within the Arab world within the second half of the twentieth century.
“He was extraordinarily vocal. Like his works, he wouldn’t hold something in and he by no means actually cared about what individuals thought — not out of disrespect; he would attempt to get reactions out of them, purposely. Reactions have been what he was at all times after. Some individuals hated him,” says El-Rayess with amusing.
Aref’s father hoped his son would flip to the world of enterprise, however he was drawn as a substitute to nature and creativity. The lounge of the El-Rayess household residence within the metropolis of Aley on Mount Lebanon was lined with Aref’s work, his daughter remembers. “I feel artwork was simply one thing he had inside him,” she says.
As he grew older, Aref turned politically energetic and joined Lebanese politician Kamal Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Get together, based in 1949. In Beirut’s creative circle, he was a focal presence, befriending the likes of Helen Khal, Huguette Caland, and Etel Adnan.
Aref was a witness to main political occasions within the area from the Fifties onwards, beginning with the Algerian Conflict of Independence to turmoil in Palestine and the Lebanese Civil Conflict. At one level throughout the latter, he fled to Algeria as there was discuss of him being a goal of an assassination plot.
“I feel he was changing into a bit too energetic,” says El-Rayess. “They simply needed to kill him and my grandad was like: ‘Get out. I would like to avoid wasting my son.’”
His dystopian, darkly comedian, surrealist work depict scenes of conflict, hanged resistance fighters, a politician with a distorted face, and a mom crying in shock as she holds her deceased son. “He was positively making an attempt to file a second in historical past. It was at all times about what was taking place within the (second),” observes El-Rayess.
There’s a lighter facet to the artist’s work too, similar to his lovely portraits of African women and men, created throughout his travels in West Africa, the place his father had a enterprise. Later in his profession, he experimented with making massive, show-stopping collage panels made up of lots of of newspaper clippings of main headlines, distinguished politicians and stars of the Nineties, from Rafic Hariri to Princess Diana. As along with his work, he was capturing a second in time.
“Folks would inform him that he was losing time and that this wasn’t ‘artwork.’ It was his manner of taking a break from portray,” says El-Rayess.
One other departure from his war-heavy work took place within the Eighties, throughout his time in Jeddah, when he created his calming, out-of-this-world “Desert” sequence, portray with ethereal hues.
This marked a brand new chapter in his life, throughout which he assisted Mayor Mohammed Stated Farsi’s plans to construct Jeddah’s sculpture park.
“I personally assume that the actual fact he left Lebanon to change into a supplier, a father, was a very completely different world for him,” says El-Rayess. “Being in a spot the place there was desert, calmness, having his personal little woman. . . I feel that introduced some sort of peace into his soul.”
