Rawass Mohamad  

Beirut, 1951

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Mohamad Rawass studied at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Lebanese University from 1971 to 1975. These were very important years for him as he enjoyed the companionship of other artists, for every painter explores his sensitivity in the work of others, Academism and copying.

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His interests led him first to graphic art and then to engraving. He used a press that was installed in the old prison of the Serail– perhaps to fend off the dizziness of artistic freedom. He witnessed the fluttering of research around him, which for the most part, led to nothing but originality at any cost, so that a certain wandering at the end of the work was inevitable. But against the background of a cultural desert, he could hardly measure the success of his own efforts, that of others, or what was going on elsewhere.

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In the early days of his graphic work, Rawass clearly set down his goals for making an image. From his last year at the Institute of Fine Arts, he had seen the construction and deconstruction of the picture and learnt how to assimilate his vocabulary, analyse it, and move towards what allowed him to become conscious of it. This era was crossed by the currents of British and American Pop Art, by Hockney and Kitaj, graphic art, advertising, and photography from the 1930s.

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There was novelty, a spirit of research that went beyond traditional limits. There was also the desire for a new look and a new interrogation of reality, if not always with new techniques, then at least with a new way of working on the material.

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Advertising images were important to Rawass: they did not reject current imagery,  and understood that it wasn’t trivial, since expression managed to convey what it wanted to say. The methodology of advertising – semiology, analysis and functioning of the image – allowed him to resolve the inevitable tensions and contradictions between the figurative and the abstract, and all the problems linked to the perpetual gap between Lebanese painting and what was going on in the rest of the world, in the rest of the country and in the practice of painters. 

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Nonetheless, he used the image as an element of the scene and not as its aim. His work was about constructing the scene, for the scene and the image were no longer confused.

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With his diploma, Rawass received a grant to specialise overseas, but the onset of the Civil War in Lebanon prevented him from benefiting from it. He returned to Morocco to teach and continued to work intensely on the problems that interested him. 

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“What do you want us to paint? Obviously one can only paint the images of daily life that touch one the most every morning – the images, the reflection of the world, the images of daily life, reality. Slowly, all this contributes to forming the elements that go on the canvas.”

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With Rawass, the photographic image was not outside the scene but part of it: there were always variations between Abstract painting, which could not include the elements of reality that interested him, and the restoration of Academism’s detail and realism. He employed a figurative treatment to create the image, using little of Cézanne’s legacy or Schwitters’ collage techniques. His work was about reassembling disparate elements in a new construction, allowing him to unify and synthesise every artistic contribution.

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Rawass had a language of elision, where graphics build the canvas: rubbing, scraping, collage. Passing from one technique to another was not a change in meaning, but a variation in the construction of the image – an image that did not suggest a superior craftsmanship to which culture was then added, as if it were an Oriental artwork searching for expression in the frame of European modernity.

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Rawass did not believe in superior references, not only because of the Anglo-Saxon approach that nourished him, but also because he believed in the cultural background of artisanal craftsmanship, where artistry is a mastered skill. In his eyes, there was only the freshness of the image and the ingenuity needed to create it.

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In 1979, Rawass enrolled at the Slade School of Art in London, where he stayed until 1981, focusing on engraving. He felt he had made an important choice – one that allowed him to assimilate the diverse elements catalysed by 1960s Pop Art, but with a different problematic, without the unbridledness of a dispersed culture. His ambition was greater: to compose the elements of a picture into a coherent language.

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The surface of an engraver’s plate does not necessarily imply formal coherence, if the  collage came only from a technical inexpressivity, or a hitch – so it progressively let its place for composition. 

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Rawass did not find any freedom in Abstraction. He had discovered that the freedom of brush and paint was insufficient, and just a decoy to reintroduce the image through Academism or Pop Art, where it had never disappeared. The only moment of abstraction was in conceptual painting.

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The illusion of depth in his technical treatment, his anguish and hysteria, were not counterbalanced by an empty image, but by his aestheticism, which floated past. By wanting to master and replenish the space, the image integrated itself naturally, as one element in the reservoir of images that make up the world, through the media, photography and advertising.

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As figurative and abstract frontiers disappeared through a series of categorisations, painting no longer had to create an image, but had to address other problems: construction, space, graphic realisation, expression, collage. At the start of the war in Lebanon, in 1975-1976, such details helped Rawass escape the vertigo and convert it into something else. His work was a diversion of his anxiety. 

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Farroukh, Onsi, Elbacha and Rawass approached the Sunni reading of the image in the same way. Farroukh explored Turkish chromolithographs, a local imagery that photography did not yet influence. The references and images came from the Ottoman style of decoration and way of life in Beirut at the end of the 19th century. Farroukh offered a portrait to Jamal Pacha during a dinner at the hotel Gassman, which led to his receiving a grant to study in Istanbul. There, as Tamim and Dimachkyé had done before him, he joined the Marine officers of the Port, to whom he taught drawing at the Naval College.

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It was the Christian subjects of the vilayet such as Srour and Corm, who raised the issue of representation. Photography was a tradition among the Armenians of the Empire, from Jerusalem to Beirut, and there were even Armenian photographers in Istanbul, some of whom had done their apprenticeship in Germany while others studied within the Armenian religious network.

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Was resemblance imposed on art as the technical echo of photography? At the time, a questioning of the image, its validity and theological justification, had yet to come. It is striking to find that, in order to overcome the problem of a historiography of the craft of reproduction, the metaphysical and theological relationship to the image had been lost. Or perhaps, as Giacometti understood it, the fundamental problem was theology, as the painter was really competing with the Creator.

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Rawass wanted to position himself inside the spiritual centre of art. He created what he loved, writing in painting or painting to serve writing. But he remained below the public’s radar, and his internal world was in pieces.

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For the rest, was a detour needed, a montage of the image in order to solicit a montage of emotion ?

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With Rawass, the glaciation of emotion and effect was not necessarily a desired outcome, but the result of setting the image at a distance. He recognised and felt the problem as being beyond him. He wanted to exist outside Lebanese painting by the radicalism of what he wanted to be as an individual. Yet the image remained mute. He painted in order not to speak.