Charaf Rafic 

Baalbek (Lebanon), 1932-Beirut, 2003

​

Rafic Charaf was destined to succeed his father at the village forge, but preferred to wander throughout the fields and cover the walls with charcoal drawings. One day, he read a life of Van Gogh – translated into Arabic in an Egyptian review – which made a strong impression on him. Then in a café in Baalbek he met a couple of intellectuals who encouraged him and organised a small exhibition for him. With Guiragossian, who came from Palestine in 1948 and developed his talent in the 1950s while rubbing shoulders with Lebanon’s urbane and intellectual society, Charaf is one the first to break with the tradition of an artist’s formation coming by way of Paris, which often seemed to barely touch the individual.

​

Enrolled in the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) from 1952 to 1955, he received a grant from the Spanish government and studied at the Fine Arts Academy of San Fernando in Madrid from 1955 to 1957. Before being social or socio-confessional, his claim for the individual – in the sense of equality and fairness – is the poetic claim for personal expression. 

​

When tried to express his own art, Rafic Charaf violently clashed with his family, even after his studies in Spain and Italy. He then made some copies of prints of the “starvation” kind (street children sharing meat with dogs). This rhetoric was more important to him than the painting itself. Settled in a popular area, he worked at first on paintings based on the exploration of his fantasies and personal mythology. It was unleashed by the exacerbation of the self and the projection of the image: cats, barbed wire, masks, skulls and desolation, which overtook more anecdotal work and, for the first time in Lebanese painting, began to show the qualities of a poetic world expressed by pictorial means.

​

This was also the first Shiite experience of painting beyond an overly constraining society. To rebalance the equilibrium, Charaf took on the personality of a character of his paintings, of an unsung hero – which he was, moreover. He circulated around town in boots and a cowboy hat that he never took off and which he doubtlessly saw as highly original. But in all those years, when it came to the conquest of personal expression, he was the absent hero of his own painting.

​

Charaf’s importance lies in the way in which his work was formed, in his own internal reading of his work, beyond the socio-communal and socio-cultural expression, which merge in the Lebanese environment, and which Charaf did not benefit from. Much later, when he became a cultural symbol, he lead works on Shiite tales and legends and Islamic talismans interpreted in the light of modern painting.

​

The case of Charaf could help solve the role of the artist in Shiite society, if he had not been so perticular, or if his intierary had not been too highly individual to become a generalisation. In his eyes, the fact that he came from Baalbek to Beirut when he was 18 despite refusals to let him study painting was like leaping over a barrier put up by the whole of Lebanese society. He achieved real pictorial expression when he spoke about himself, his metaphors and fantasies. He did not stop talking about what interested him from the moment painting became his language, without necessarily being a pictorial one, because of a shift between what he approached and the manner in which he approached it.

​

Charaf was truly gifted, but he rushed into ideas and often only extricated himself through variations, persuaded that painting served to deliver a message. He engaged in an exploration of the Shiite sociocultural universe, and then, in the early 1960s, made clear demands while gaining a political conscience and sitting on the community council. 

​

Charaf had lived in a one-bedroom flat, surrounded by countless birdcages, manifesting an urgency and vehemence of expression through an excessive simplicity. We are not talking about Kokoschka’s doll, but each artist expresses himself where he can. He taught drawing in a suburban school, which is not exactly the poetic place that one might imagine from afar. In the 1960s, he spoke in metaphors of his extreme personal and social fragility. 

After copying chromos, his first attempts to express himself, he discovered that it would be better to make his own: an injured heron in a cave, skulls stuck on posts, birds flying low against a dark sky, cats wandering in the night. This was a naive but intensely lived decoding, and when the Beirut society saw the painter in him, everything was done to assure him his place at the table. 

​

For a long time, he exhibited every year at the Carlton Hotel: landscapes of the Bekaa Valley, stylised birds, references to animated cartoon hero Antar, who took charge of history and awareness. Antar also implied his own entry into legend, a history beyond time.

​

Charaf certainly poeticises the canvas in a literary and painterly or illustrative way.

​

In the best examples, plastic expression finds its strength in a talisman of the self. He then tried to synthesise popular Shiite imagery, the first stage of distancing himself from the process while integrating himself into his painting, that became political in the literal sense of the term. It questioned his conduct and his identity, and his desire to leave the individual and his grievances behind can be seen. There was an opening, a pictorial externalisation, as well as a more assured mastery that could express his intentions.

​

The literary quality of these paintings seems to have been exorcised by the autobiography that Charaf published in the early 1980s. His plastic sense developed more external qualities, as if in opposition to his internal world, which was more intimate, sorrowful and confused. The book allowed him to liberate himself, as he no longer had anything intimate to say. 

​

He wanted to summarise his life in one go and to make it understood, to win the challenge set in every childhood, through nostalgia and memories. The way he speaks of it in his book, which can seem extravagant, can not hide neither the simplicity and significance of his trajectory, nor his frequent turmoil. As to his political position, it would be necessary to explain in detail why what he was searching for was directly connected to who he was.

Charaf is important because he allows for a complete reading of Lebanese society from the 1950s to the 1970s – a denominational and community reading for sure, but also a social and pictorial one, for the two go hand in hand. He also appeals to decipher the way in which he understood Lebanese society and became aware of himself; of how to function within it, as well as in the Arab world, of which Beirut was the echo.

​

Charaf was far from being marginal. Cafés played a great role, as places that pre-selected a social presence. It was rather his reading of the different strata of his own life that that mattered, and then his way of presenting himself in front of society and of clearly articulating a relationship made of contradictions, of the presence of everything and its opposite in Lebanese society. It was about either playing a painter or being a painter; about finding a way through which Lebanese society could perceive you as a painter and provide you with the financial possibility of being one.

​

Charaf borrows from formal languages, but always to add something to them. This does not prevent erratic variations, but, most often, his aesthetic adds the intelligence of understanding to forms taken from elsewhere. This borrowing is perhaps linked to the claim of a Shiite cultural tradition. As to borrowing from the West, unlike other painters, they were not plagiarism. His Shiite background as a socio-denominational presence and his painting as a language were always equal. But all evidence shows that he is more concerned with taking charge of cultural heritage than with confronting modernity, of which he had seen everything.

​

What functioned here was not sociological but cultural and community, beyond any explanation linked to the problem of identity. 

​

With him, the authenticity that generated his forms – including their awkwardness – is obvious. This strength is drawn from the need to research and to express himself. For he is, in some way, grasped by the throat and forced to speak by himself, which was his only means of existence.

​

Charaf had been around the Lebanese pictorial scene. He did not dream of Spain or Italy, but of painting what was nearest, and this was the longest path to follow. For a time, he was convinced that a painter had to wear an ascot tie. Spain was not a bad choice for a hidalgo like him.

​

He had to understand Lebanon, its rifts and communities, to understand Beirut as a human city and environment. What he understood about Lebanese society was not just what a Shiite could understand. What he wanted, above all, was to summarise his own life and to share it. 

​

After his first exhibition in 1951 at the Al Ahmar Library in Baalbek, Charaf exhibited every year until 1961, when he had a show at the UNESCO offices in Beirut. He exhibited at the Carlton Hotel in Beirut from 1963 to 1972, and at the Contact Gallery from 1973 to 1975.