Born in Aley, Mount Lebanon, in 1928, Aref El Rayess was a curious, cosmopolitan individual with a prolific and versatile artistic output. Beginning to paint alongside his mother at the age of eleven, El Rayess eventually relocated to Paris to study art in 1950, where he attended the studios of Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and l’Académie de la Grande Chaumière and would befriend artistic contemporary Saloua Raouda Choucair (lot 5). Between 1954 and 1956, he travelled to West Africa, a period which had a profound influence on his works of this period, with Western African folkloric and mystical themes becoming recurring motifs. From 1957 to 1960, El Rayess worked between Lebanon, Florence, and Rome whilst studying Phoenician, Assyrian, Sumerian, and Pharaonic art, during which t.mes his interest in the ancient Semitic art forms would begin to manifest in his oeuvre, otherwise known as his ‘Sand Period.’ Artistic creation for El Rayess was a vital means to present his ideas around humanity, identity, and nature, and to act as a commentary and a critical reflection upon the many places in which he lived and worked. Andrée Sfeir-Semler writes:
“Wherever Aref El Rayess went, he would drink in the culture and ‘spirit’ of the t.mes and place like a sponge, ingesting it, and making it his own. He would produce paintings with his distinct handwriting, which would nevertheless express the zeitgeist of that society, and the specificities of the art scene of that period and location. He was a traveler, an independent brain, breathing freedom into every work he produced.”
Returning to Lebanon in 1966, the year preceding the creation of the present work, El Rayess was instrumental in developing the Lebanese arts and gallery scene, one notable connection being his mentorship to Helen Khal (lot 8) who was co-founder of Gallery One, Lebanon’s first permanent art gallery. The artist spent 1967 between Beirut and Leeds, UK, on the invitation of Tony Johnson, a collects or who had commissioned two sculptural works for the park on his estate. Though El Rayess’ works became palpably political from the late 1960s, the present work sits at the cusp of those and his abstract, non-figurative works from the mid-1960s. Distinctive of this mid-century style and marking one of El Rayess’ earliest works to appear at auction, Untitled (1967) demonstrates a preoccupation with surface and the fluidity of paint; rendered in a wash of deep red hues, El Rayess’ apocalyptic composition is ominous and forthcoming. Much like the paintings of Max Ernst, which respond to the horrors of war, El Rayess’ works of this period are conscious of the conflict that was plaguing the Arab region, and bear the memories of his prior travels to West Africa during which t.mes he explored notions of injustice, the human psyche, and man’s propensity for destruction.
As an artist who has evaded rigid classification, El Rayess has constructed an oeuvre with a visual vocabulary uniquely able to traverse periods and movements with his manipulation of figuration, expressionism, and abstraction across a range of media. As in the words of Catherine David, “In all its paradoxes and singularity, with flashing breakthroughs and dim impasses, the oeuvre of Aref El Rayess is an exemplary, uncompromising, modern journey” (Catherine David, ‘Aref el Rayess,’ in ibid., p. 11). El Rayess has exhibited extensively internationally, including with a series of works at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His expansive and dynamic oeuvre has crystallised his significant role in the history of modern Lebanese art.