Mohammad Rawas stands today at the peak of an outstanding artistic career. Those familiar with his work will welcome this volume as a much-needed permanent source of reference, while those encountering the artist for the first time can enjoy a unique introduction to his work in the 235 reproductions presented here. In the accompanying text, the artist himself provides a fascinating insight into his life and work, his compositional techniques and sources of inspiration. A painting by Rawas offers a complex visual and conceptual experience - both compelling and enigmatic, charming yet vigorously challenging. Constructing our own shifting narratives around the diverse elements of his paintings, we also explore the thought processes that led the artist to assemble these particular groups of images to form his original statements.

Born in Beirut in 1951, cosmopolitan and internationalist in his thinking, Rawas frequently 'quotes' images from European art and photography - from Michelangelo to Peter Blake, from Vermeer to Nadar - as well as from his Middle Eastern roots. In their new contexts, figures from familiar works of art seem to remind us of the continuity of beauty and human creativity - a calm space within a complex and often calamitous world.

Set against these statements of artistic continuity are fleeting moments captured in the photographic images that form a striking element of his compositions

- though, paradoxically, this fleetingness is given a permanence within the total work of art.

Words and three-dimensional assemblages, too, find a place on many of the canvases, further extending a work's expressive possibilities. Although the assembled elements cannot be fully experienced in print, superb reproductions give a strong sense of the contribution these precise and delicate structures make to the diverse creative tensions within each work. It is by these varied and original means that Rawas invites us to interrogate our experience of the world across time and cultures, through collected images that shimmer with the contingency of the moment.

THE ART OF RAWAS

SAQI BOOKS 2004

 

Promises Fulfilled

Beautifully designed, printed and crafted, The Art of Rawas is a fascinating account, in his own words, of the painter's artistic biography illustrated through 230 color plates. He tells everything about his working methods, his techniques, his inspiring sources, his likings and dislikings with straightforward intellectual honesty and simplicity. He displays in dissecting his life and art the same qualities, the meticulousness, the perfectionism, the unprejudiced approach he exhibits in constructing his assemblages. He ponders over his creative process - "controlling the spontaneous" as he puts it in a nutshell - with the detachment of an external observer, providing the data and means to decipher the metaphoric and metonymic complexes of images, words and objects of his works without dispelling their precious ambiguity open to multiple readings.

The recapitulative exhibition Early Works and Late Works purports to confront the budding beginnings (1970-1978) with the blooming maturity

(2000-2004) of a singular artist, skipping the stages in between. This telescopic presentation strikingly reveals the seeds of late works in early ones.

The cutting out of pictorial space, the quotations, words and texts, the combination of multiple elements in confined surroundings, the high skyline structure of landscapes, the robustness of colors, the passion for the female nude, the homage to senior artists through purposeful borrowing of models, the use of photography, the transformation of situations into enigmatic conceptual and pictorial statements, most of the outstanding traits of the Rawas approach are already there in one way or other.

The creative work of three decades is implicitly contained in its first tentative prototypes, its archetypal specimens. Its subsequent stages of development, whatever the vicissitudes, are but the explicitation, the bringing forth into light of what was obscurely laying in germ. In spite of all the cerebral, planned, calculated content of Rawas's works, it is plainly clear, when first and last works are brought together, that the tree was in the seed. The seed may never grow if it falls on inadequate ground. The auspicious soil is the personality of the artist. The personality of Rawas was perfectly attuned to this harmonious organic growth. He has been able to draw from himself, his background, his culture, his story, his thinking, his watchmaker patience the vital nutrients to make the tree grow and bear fruit. Early fruit: unripe yet promising. Late fruit: mature with promises fulfilled. The fruit of maturity are already yielding seeds of still stronger, healthier trees. A new beginning is in the offing.

Joseph TARRAB

 

Both resonance and tension are at play amongst the perceptual and conceptual expressions of a work of art. This interplay keeps me enthralled throughout the art making process. I am increasingly convinced that the aesthetic experience is wanting when either expression is absent.

Mohamad El Rawas