Mohammad El Rawas

Mohammad El Rawas is a pioneering Lebanese artist and printmaker born in Beirut in 1951. He earned his degree in painting from the Institute of Fine Art at the Lebanese University, in 1975.

Escaping the Lebanese civil war, he fled with his family to Damascus, and later to Morocco in 1976, where he worked as an art instructor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de l’Enseignement Technique de Rabat before moving back to Beirut in 1979.

Granted a scholarship from the Lebanese University, he pursued his MA in printmaking at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and graduated in 1981, after which he returned to Lebanon.

He taught at the Lebanese University, Institute of Fine Arts, in Beirut from 1982-2009, while also serving as the Secretary-General of the Association of Lebanese Artists till 1992.

He is a founding member of the Syndicate of Lebanese Artists and taught for over a decade at the American University of Beirut, Department of Architecture and Design from 1992-2004.

As a small boy, he was prohibited to mingle with other neighboring children or to go out with friends. As an alternative, his overprotective father offered him tools to paint and draw. El Rawas became fond of the activity and kept his drawings in a little box which he would open every other day to allow his drawings to breathe.

El Rawas started out with a conventional approach to painting, taught by several renowned Lebanese modernists such as Munir Eido, Chafic Abboud, Aref El Rayess, Yvette Ashkar, and Halim Jurdak. He painted still life, nudes, and city life, favoring impressionism, cubism and abstract expressionism.

Devastated by the war, he stopped painting for nearly two years, to resume his artistic endeavor once settled in Morocco in 1976. He strived for novelty questioning the definition of a work of art and the role of an artist; and aimed to trigger an intellectual stimulus through his works. He incorporated illustrations, graphics, and texts as both expressive and compositional elements depicting socio-political matters. His canvases were often rendered in gouache with fading light rustic tones.

Searching for a technique which demanded minimal gestural practice and emotional outburst, he abandoned the brushstroke mark and sprayed paint adopting an airbrush instead.

El Rawas introduced collage and existing photo images to his works as an objective representation of reality, building on the works of Neo-Dada and pop artists. He appropriated and re-contextualized his images only to undermine their original meaning and brought representation into conceptual art practice. He used to rub images onto the surface of the paper using an ink solvent or paint thinner. To maintain a flat surface, he had to reproduce the photographic image by copying it deploying pointillism such as in 'Matrimony and Maternity' 1978.

It was only when he moved to London in 1981 to study printmaking, mentored by Bartolomeo Dos Santos, that he was introduced to elaborate printing techniques such as etching, lithography, and silk screening.

Upon his return to Beirut, he couldn’t produce any lithographic prints or silkscreen, for there were no such workshops in Lebanon at the time. As a result, he resumed oil and acrylic painting producing photorealistic portraits displayed in a grid composition with different other abstracted images.

When he started teaching at the Lebanese University, he developed an etching studio and started producing his works there, accomplishing his first fine art print in Lebanon, A Childhood Moment 1981. He established another etching, engraving and silkscreen studio at the American University of Beirut in 1990 in the Department of Architecture and Design.

Heading to his signature style, inspired by Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg, El Rawas introduced, for the first time, assemblage into his paintings in 1987 with The Lady Who Descended the Staircase as an homage to Marcel Duchamp.

Deploying mixed media, prints, oil, and acrylic paint, he produces figures and details borrowing from old masters and modern artists influenced most by the British pop artist, Peter Blake. He selects his figures from different eras, put them out of their original context, along with presently created ones- crafting a cryptic multi-image that stimulates the eye and challenges the mind. Through diverse subjects within one interlocked theme, he depicts the absurdity of life and the likeness of human behavior through time.

The woman’s figure is central in his works, portrayed with no emotions; yet, resonating genteelness, sensuality, and eroticism. She acts as a proxy that decodes a multilayered reality reflecting the turbulent changes in the artist’s world. In 2013, he created a series of small sculptures in metal and wood, incorporating small plastic figurines known as Manga girls in Japanese comic books.

El Rawas' unique narrative art tells the story of a postmodern world. He cynically portrays the irrational world in a fantasized juxtaposition; combining super realistic vibrant paintings including comic figures at times, with flat metal sculptures, balsa wood, rods, encaustic and plastic figurines. He created a hybrid world of the past and the present in an amalgam that expressed the continuum of time and culture. He takes the art of assemblage, the process of deconstruction, and the idea of magical realism to a whole new level.

El Rawas currently lives and works in Lebanon.

Written by Wafa Roz © Dalloul Art Foundation