When Aref El Rayess died in the winter of 2005, it became quiet around him. Dust settled on pictures, sculptures, books and brushes. Water seeped into the vault from the souk above his studio, rats perished in the suitcases that the Lebanese artist had filled with documents during his lifetime. "It was interesting and terrible," said Catherine David about her first visit to the town of Aley, which is in the hills above Beirut. The French art historian was the artistic director of Documenta X and director of various museums in Paris - and she is a proven connoisseur of modern and contemporary art from the Arab world. But before she discovered hundreds of chaotically stacked paintings in Aref El Rayess' studio, she had only seen one original of his:A kind of palimpsest from the sixties that reminded her of Sigmar Polke. "I had never seen anything like it in Beirut before."

Lena Bopp

Editor in the features section.

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For eight years now, Catherine David has been concerned with the artist, whose importance for Arab modernism is recognized, but whose work has been little researched. Only now is a first retrospective dedicated to him, on view in the Sfeir-Semler gallery in Beirut, which manages the estate of Aref El Rayess. The gallery owner Andrée Sfeir-Semler will only sell a tiny part of the work and send the much larger part on a museum tour, initially to Sharjah and Valencia. It took a long time to get this far. In Aref El Rayess' studio, there were works that no one had in their hands for ages. During the civil war, ricochets hit and damaged pictures. Water softened clay sculptures that can hardly be moved today. And in the artist's house,across from the studio at the other end of a terraced garden, photos, correspondence, diaries, essays, sketchbooks and around four thousand pictures and drawings slumbered under dust and cobwebs from decades.

Catherine David began to sort out the mess. “But we are not the Getty Foundation,” calls out the art historian. There was neither the means nor the expertise to unearth the treasure. The artist's daughter, Hala El Rayess, sold four paintings to raise money for a couple of employees who turned the former living room, the wall of which her father had painted with an abstract fresco, into a workplace. From here they dug their way through the rooms on two floors, which today actually look like a professionally managed archive. This is all the more remarkable as such archives are rare not only in Lebanon but in the entire Arab world. In addition to the "Early Works Room" and the "Late Works Room" with shelves full of paintings, there are drawer cabinets with drawings,which are wrapped in special paper that had to be imported because it could not be found in the country. Much has been digitized. Important, albeit by far not all parts of the body have been spotted.

From all this, the picture of a man is put together who was born in 1928 into a well-off Druze family which - as was and is typical for many families in Lebanon - led a nomadic life in the diaspora. From 1948 on, she commuted between France and Senegal for a decade, where Aref El Rayess created the first series of impressive portraits, which can now be seen in Catherine David's retrospective with 109 works, which is largely displayed in chronological order. At the beginning of the sixties followed a formative time in Italy, of which abstract pictures in dark impasto tell. Together with his works from the subsequent time in New York, these paintings bear witness to an artist who was receptive to the styles of his time, but never copied them, but transposed them into his own handwriting.This is also the case in the series called “Flying Carpets”, whose flowing paint is reminiscent of the abstract American painters of the era.