Aref El-Rayess

  Aref El-Rayess  (1928 – 2005)

Aref El Rayess was a prolific artist, mainly known as a painter, he also practiced etching, sculpture and tapestry. One of his tapestries, The Signs of Cadmus, is part of the collection of the Unesco Palace in Paris.

His work is widely based on the human being and its relationship to nature and history, stating that “Man is a unity that embodies both the means and the goals.

In the 1960s his painting evolved around Man and the Third World and in the early 1970s, he unexpectedly presented an exhibition related to whorehouses off Martyrs’ Square, Beirut.

With the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, Rayess was one of the artists who interpreted the tragic events in art. Staying in Algiers, he produced in 1976 a series of etchings entitled The Road to Peace. This work gave its name to an exhibition Saleh Barakat curated in 2009 at the Beirut Art Center, encompassing Lebanese visual arts between 1975 and 1991. Apart from the etching series, oil paintings depicting the horror of war were featured in the exhibition. In these troubled times, Rayess showed political involvement in creating a poster commemorating the assassination of the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt.