Rayess Aref 

Aley (Lebanon), 1928-Beirut, 2005

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Without any history of culture in Lebanon, or at least any historical approach of Lebanese painting, should we try to make a socio-confessional reading of it ? This would certainly not diminish the value of Lebanese painting; even less would it stand for a Universalist approach to culture. From the outset, Lebanese painters positioned themselves within the complex network of the country’s seventeen communities and the cultural institutions of each one of them, which were part of the state – in the shadow of institutional figures shared since Independence.

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But is a painter always the product of his surroundings, his community, and his religion? To think this way would be a curious approach, and rather an ironic one, in the word’s first meaning of “eironeia” or questioning. Since the middle of the XIXth century, a community and religious network was woven into Lebanon, for the simple reason that otherwise the country could only base its cultural self-awareness on incomplete information.

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It is remarkable that the self-image offered to each community was, for some time, open to everyone’s judgment. This progressive assimilation was one of the measures of the advancement of an essentially urban – and more precisely in Beirut – civil society. Beirut was seen as the meeting place and capital of different communities.

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However, there seemed to be no way of overcoming the issue of the prohibition imposed on image by Islam for some painters, while others included Christian religious imagery in their paintings of bourgeois celebrations. This resulted in a system that excluded exhibitions and the need to show one’s work. The latter was not a question of offering an image of oneself for others to understand or, at least, to interpret. An overly restrictive determinism remained in the narrowness of this community approach, resulting from a simplification due to the absence of information and research on the different elements that make up an abundant and complex cultural landscape. The total absence of points of reference in this field would result in a distorted art criticism.

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Aref Rayess hailed from a Druze family, and was born in Aley on 28th October 1928. After studying engineering, his father had settled in what was still French West Africa and operated trading posts and plantations in Dakar. 

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Aref studied at the National College of Aley, whose director at the time was Maroun Abboud, the Lebanese writer and advertising executive. Abboud was a Voltarian figure, partial to sarcastic irony, a Maronite from the mountains who did not preach about coexistence but certainly lived it. This master, with an exceptional culture and open spirit, who made his mark on Rayess through his deep taste for truth, but also through the part of provincialism that led him to join, at sixteen years old, the Vincentian Fathers (or Pères Lazaristes) of Antoura, the oldest Francophone school in the Middle East, where he acquired what Rayess called his “Jesuit training”.

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Aref Rayess shared Abboud’s intellectual curiosity, as well as his manner of expressing his mysticism and his conviction in the reality of his ideas, and the need to preserve them. He also shared his taste for flushing out other people’s ideas, as their most precious good, since they were also his own. This was not the result of a displaced curiosity, but a natural and civil contact with the other.

When Rayess spoke of Hiroshima as an “internal cataclysm”, it was not just a figure of speech or a mere image, but the reality of his perception. For him, sensory perception and the immediate data of consciousness and reality gravitated around a central nucleus and a background of questioning, the whole being strictly upheld by a doctrinal framework.

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All the religious and moral questions of the world thus came naturally to him. For his religion was exactly that: to unify the vision of man and universe. Rayess offered a striking example of the plasticity of a thought, whose mysticism is based on a visionary experience. Those who understood what he was looking for were rare, but what he wanted was, quite simply, to draw.

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In 1946, he went to Beirut to see the French painter Georges Cyr, with his portfolio under his arm. At the time, he was occupied with giving shape to his studies – he was not on a wild metaphysical quest but was concerned with making sensitive forms. If he sensed an internal gulf, he would draw it inside the black of the sheet ; if he had a nightmare, he would draw a nightmare. This was the best way of going to the most complex place and drawing what he found there.

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During his time with the Vincentian Fathers he had read European philosophy intensively, remembered everything that seemed to tie in with his preoccupations, and attempted to grasp what seemed to be the clearly articulated and formulated answers to his enquiries. Around his twentieth birthday, he started a correspondence with Mikhail Nouaymeh, the Lebanese writer whose mysticism and desire for the union of man with the world was very close to Druze theology. In any case, he would not have been able to stick to the answers that his true religious background offered him, as in his community the doctrine was reserved for insiders, which he was not.

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It was at this time that drawing became the most appropriate tool for Rayess to express what he wanted to say at the level of form, while writing implied a more abstract enquiry and a vocabulary he could not access. He had the atavistic ability of being interested in everything and completely giving himself into these interests. This was accompanied by an undeniable sculptural gift, which he would not channel until much later, choosing painting as the means of structured expression.

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Until his thirties, he also expressed his anxiety about his place in the world through mime, as a “plastic” expression of the body and the theatre, which also interested him. He sought to unify his vision through expression, in a kind of symbiosis of man and universe. This search became a plastic expression and henceforth increased his need to satisfy it. From the beginning, he adopted an attitude that he could not abandon when he realised that truth did not offer closure and rest, and that his anxieties would become his way of life.

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Between 1950 and 1957, Rayess lived in Paris, which served as a place of knowledge and apprenticeship. The most striking about this period is that the city plunged him into such a state of inner turmoil that he failed to paint a thing. This emotional burden had less to do with the passage from the village of Aley to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, than with his mental attitude: a desire to accumulate the greatest amount of knowledge possible. He was a sort of incensed student, more anxious about the idea of the picture than about the picture itself.

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In one stroke, Paris set him in front of all the painting and culture of the world, while painting had been no more than a personal affair for him until then. He assimilated modern painting in a chaotic fashion, without being aware of the differences; he saw Braque as he had only painted for him, and approached him from the front without any distance. Everything happened as if he had a grievance with painting, as if he reproached the world for the fact that he was only a painter, and then reproached painting for not being enough to translate the scale of his internal vision and reassure him. Yet the truth is that one finds in painting what one has put in it : a picture is not an idea, but an object.

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Faced with this clash of cultures – cautiously called acculturation – the reference points of the young Druze from Aley fell one after the other. He wore out his intelligence trying to understand the Paris of the 1950s, and obstinately refused to budge.

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When Paris had shaken him up too much, he returned to live in Senegal, which meant far more to him than the opposite of Paris: Senegal was a middle way, and a source of reassurance and reconciliation with himself, like the gouaches that he painted on the banks of the Casamance. He enjoyed strolling along the banks of the river and punctuated his journey by taking a room for the night in one of the small hotels for business travellers. For him, Senegal enabled to take charge of reality by painting – one that would not be lived as a state of crisis and refusal.

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In 1958 Rayess returned to Lebanon. His exhibition that same year at the Italian Cultural Centre of Beirut was a huge success. In his paintings of Africa, which were elegant for their abandoning of elegance, his singular voice could clearly be heard against other Lebanese painters of the 1950s, which were stuck in the repetition of naturalistic landscapes that verged on the folkloric. Between 1959 and 1963, Rayess spent one year in Florence, where he had received an Italian government grant, and then spent three years in Rome as a fine arts student. He was so conscious about his technique that he only came to explore abstraction when he realised that it was one of the necessities of painting.

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On the invitation of the American government, between 1964 and 1965 he spent the year in the USA, where he left behind pictorial solipsism, and his evolution allowed him to take part in Lebanese painting as it was unfolding. From early 1966 he settled in his studio in Aley, where he synthesised his learning and the maturity that he had acquired. 

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After the defeat of 1967, Arab politics became an occasion of reassessment for him, due to a shock that was not only military, but dwelled into the sole proof of his existence.

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Made Professor at the newly created Institute of Fine Arts at the heart of the Lebanese University, in 1973 he was elected President of the Lebanese Association of Painters and Sculptors and became one of the principal figures on the art scene.

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Rayess presented the reality of life in Lebanon in his political and rural paintings (mountain landscapes and pastels of flowers) and produced a famous series of drawings of the brothels on Cannons Square. 

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He investigated Lebanon, and what used what he found in his paintings and drawings. In the dozen years that passed between his return and the Civil War in 1975, he did not separate political thought from painting. Nonetheless, the painter cannot encompass the whole man, and one can sense the neurotic refusal of pictorial achievement like the superstition of the anti-failure.

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After the disappointments that resulted from the war, his double itinerary led him to a progressive retreat from the scene, right up to his departure for Saudi Arabia in 1980. He lived it as an internal exile, rather than an obligation to escape events.

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Aref Rayess is the painter who has gone the furthest, according to his means, athrough the acceptation of internal exploration. The difficulty of this exploration had less to do with prohibition than with the literalness of pictorial expression and the tension that arose from the means used to express it. 

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He established a vocabulary that may have been approximate, but at least represented a synthesis of the different stages that he had passed through. One striking point about him is the way he intentionally blurs or weakens part of the canvas.

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He produced some ironic and devastating chromolithographs – illustrations of proverbs, maxims taken from experience, symbolic diversions from real situations – that were all the stronger when the diversion was spoken and not shown. 

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His studio drawings, variations drawn from various sources, mark the work of the imaginary on reality. 

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His series of naturalist drawings raise the question of the contribution that reality made to Lebanese painting in the 1970s. Some painters responded to this painfully, arriving at the nearest possible point of a canvas that draws its unity from different components. 

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Thanks to the talent of a few painters, the creation of a properly Lebanese canvas was approached without this problem being clearly asked. 

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Rayess possesses a sure grip on the plastic arts that allows him to decipher forms for himself and others. He has the kind of intelligence that gives you the arms for fighting any distress, especially the one which is attracting you. 

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In the extreme, he sees himself as a reformer or a political man, the very essence of an exile: “For sure, I am alone and undone but, at least, I will not have taken part in the slaughter that was the war in Lebanon.” 

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What in Rayess seems like a hallucination of disaster comes internal mechanisms, where the internal resources of the individual go as far as they can to confront the world without disappearing before his eyes.

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The relationship to the image as a conjuring of the personal nightmare never ceased to obsess him. His access to spirituality did not give shape to a myth, but to an internal and living reality that unified asceticism. For him, sculpture was a magical creation of form, a way of giving shape to something. 

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He progressed from the image as illustration to the image as an instrument of exploration of an interior world, that gradually became whatever he had access to in his life and thoughts. As a result, Rayess felt more and more frustrated by informal and abstract painting, and progressively returned to illustrative and mystic treatments of the image, which had been his fundamental tendency since his correspondence with Nouaymeh, who can also be considered as the echo of Gibran.