Aref El Rayess, Untitled (Composition with Symbols), 1964: The Friday Fine

He never associated his work with a specific movement and considered his repertoire to be a vocabulary of images meaningful to himself. His work juggles diverse styles, deploying figuration, expressionism, symbolism, and geometrical abstraction across a variety of different media. His canvases voiced an endless dialogue between shape, form, colour, and texture, often yielding to elaborately patterned surfaces in sober colours.

 

-Wafa Roz for DAF Beirut

 

Whilst El Rayess was predominantly a painter, he was also a sculptor, academic, actor and performer.  He trained in Europe in the studios of several significant artists, including at the Paris ateliers of Fernand Léger and André Lhoté (similarly to his Indian counterpart Ram Kumar).

 

Whilst in Paris he also trained in sculpture under the tutelage of Ossip Zadkine, and later in Rome and Florence, returning to Lebanon in 1963. Areound this time he worked with Janine Rubeiz to found Dar El Fan, an important cultural space in Beirut.

Whilst in the US El Rayess consigned some works to Rose Fried Gallery in New York. There isn’t a specific listing for him in the gallery archives, suggesting he was part of a group show. His aesthetic is certainly in keeping with the material the gallery was showing the mid-1960s.

 

The gallery was opened in the 1940s and ran until Fried’s death in 1972. She showed abstract artists and was instrumental in introducing the American public to painters such as Mondrian and Kandinsky. In 1968 she held a show of Indian painter Avinash Chandra.

 

"For Rose’s artists, she was the kind of dealer who offered support and encouragement. Her mission was to present work that was original, genuine, and often, unpopular."