UNTIL SUNDAY 10/9
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
Aref El Rayess was a prominent actor in art and culture in Lebanon between the sixties and eighties whose international recognition has languished after his death in 2005. The IVAM and the curator of this exhibition, the French Catherine David, They bring together a good part of his work in Valencia to polish it and highlight a self-taught artist more concerned about political crises, social and cultural of his time than the reigning “isms” of the artistic world. The result is a very heterogeneous work in substance and form in which a personal style does not appear as we know in the West., if not a variety of styles impossible to catalog. Perhaps influenced by that folklorizing trend of the Arab world that we practice in the West, At AU we highlight the wonderful series of oil pastel drawings dedicated to traditional Arab architecture that he made in the early seventies. The drawing is just one of the formats that you will find in Aref El Rayess. Construction (1958-1978), shares space with paintings about the insurgent fighters who in 1958 They put the pro-Western Lebanese president Camille Chamoun in check, geometric abstractions made of materials such as plaster, arena, stones and glass paste, terracotta sculptures made in Rome, canvases and gouaches Inspired by the views of the Los Angeles freeways, monstrous animal figures that draw on Mexican muralism and Italian futurism or collages in which it represents the struggles in the Arab world of the nineties. The IVAM presents us with the heterogeneous art of a good living who knew and wanted to look at the popular classes without paying attention to fashions. S.M.
