The assemblages of Mohammad El Rawas enfold an intentional dialectic of the personal and global, and in a dialogue with time. Indeed, his forthcoming exhibition ‘Stop Making Sense’ is a declaration from the artist that the art of the past is not dead, as it can seem, but rather ignored. For El Rawas, the old and new work together, forming a continuous line or circle. Inserting his own painting into his new works, he lives within his own past as he delves into an archaeology of the future. For this artist, such visitations occur through a juxtaposition of images, constellations of references and objects, photographs and paintings, housed in neat geometric cradles. Stemming from a need to express his own thoughts, worries and preoccupations, his work is equally invested in the need to respond aesthetically in a way that does not resemble other work around it, but specifically seeks something new.
Perhaps most importantly El Rawas looks to pique the interest of the viewer, to grab their attention, and animate them towards another way of seeing. What are you trying to say to this carrier of art, he asks, continuing, do anything to break the convention; it is a game of the mind, a serious game.
With El Rawas we cannot sit within one moment in time, and indeed he is a reminder that such stability is not possible. There is a continual yet disrupted circling, moving back to the past and forward into a projected future. Beyond modernity, he says, banality is the enemy. Divert the attention somewhere else. And don’t forget, stop making sense.
Born in Beirut in 1951, El Rawas studied painting at the Institute of Fine Art of the Lebanese University, graduating in 1975 with honors, receiving the Lebanese University scholarship to study abroad. The year of his graduation marked the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon, leading him to stop painting and then to leave his country for Morocco where he stayed for two years in Rabat, teaching art and resuming painting. He returned to Beirut in 1979 to hold his first solo show, before joining the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the same year. Upon his return to Beirut in 1981 with a Masters Degree in printmaking, he started his academic career at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut, that lasted for 27 years.
Since 1979 El Rawas has held 12 individual exhibitions in Beirut, London and Dubai and participated in more than 40 international art biennials and exhibitions in the UK, USA, Norway, Tunisia, Brazil, Japan, Kuwait, France, Netherlands, Egypt, UAE, Poland and China. In these international shows he won five prizes and honorable mentions including, in 2007, the award of the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries, for his first installation and video art piece. His work is found in many museums and public collections in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan, UAE, Norway and the UK.
Drawing is central to Bassam Khawaji’s practice, used primarily as a preliminary tool to put out into the world what is inside, and to gain a formal relation to his internal world through that process. His compositions in paint, as well as the relief works of wire and plaster on display in the Upper Gallery, are shaped through this systematic drawing process, the white reliefs highlighting the simplicity of form before colour, when shape is the key axis. Pulling away from the paper but not yet emerging onto canvas, wire lines become simple forms, encased then in thick white coverings. These works might be first sketches, and yet they speak a language that is complete, formed from the manipulation of wire which is frame and support as well as composition and line.
