At Saleh Barakat Gallery, the Lebanese artist transforms the canvas into a technological and theatrical realm where reality, imagination, and the history of art converge.
The image prevails in the exhibition of artist Mohammad El Rawas at Saleh Barakat Gallery. The colors are pure, and the works are refined, presented by the artist with the utmost realism and a highly precise aesthetic quality. His studio has become a factory of construction, engineering, and meticulous calculations. His eye turns toward art in order to recount its stories and chapters, as though what we are seeing is reality itself.
Reality is transformed into art, while art becomes immersed in its own rituals. At that moment, we encounter the imaginary, while the painting, as a tangible material object, becomes part of the memory of art history, as well as the history of the artist himself.
El Rawas presents technologically enhanced art projects, adding modern industrial techniques from today’s world to the physical body of the painting. The artwork has become a form of research that operates within a mechanical environment. Yet these paintings rely on machines and devices that detach the painting from its natural context, before reshaping it in a way that creates a sense of unfamiliarity.
We are confronted with the issue of play and amusement in El Rawas’s artistic output. Is art, for him, an invention that he simply practices for personal enjoyment? At its core, El Rawas’s game is a game governed by rules par excellence, with intellectual dimensions that bring together a spirit of play and disorder, between “playful physics” and logic, or what could be described as visual paradoxes and social games.
The works of this great Lebanese artist are marked by the influence of games and spatio-temporal illusions that can be felt throughout his entire body of work, much like early photography and the prehistory of cinema. We should not forget that cinema itself, in its early days, was a popular art form, a kind of “spectacle box” presented in villages.
El Rawas’s artistic practice is linked to the theatrical dimension of the arts through the arrangement of elements within installation art. We are drawn into his enclosed sensory space to experience an aesthetic encounter based on a close relationship between its components.
In all cases, installation appears as a sensory room or a space that is partially or entirely enclosed, into which the viewer is drawn in order to experience a genuine aesthetic experience.
In contrast with the two-dimensional nature of painting and the three-dimensional nature of sculpture, the painting moves closer to architecture through the spaces it contains, spaces that can accommodate dolls, or to theatre as a box or an open cube. In this way, the painting extends beyond its own limits, like a sculpture that seeks to draw the viewer inward.
This is where the close relationship between the works and architecture emerges, through the creation of spaces resembling theatrical boxes. They appear as small, staged scenes that expand across layered and interconnected times and spaces.
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