Aref el Rayess spent the best part of the 1980s in Saudi Arabia. Initially commissioned to create large-scale public sculptures in Jeddah, Tabuk and Riyadh, he was also an advisor to the Jeddah Open Air Museum. For several years, faced with the landscapes of Saudi, he painted deserts, repeatedly, compulsively, an almost mystical, meditative exercise that turned dry lands into abstract, sculptural, color fields. The works on view are key in the series, showing desert stones piled up into imaginary constructions.

Producing sketches, watercolor drawings, etchings or paintings, MARWAN developed his Sisyphean painterly language through a meditative, spiritual approach by painting over and over the same face, often on the same surface. The works on view are watercolors from the 60s to the 80s, that follow the shift in his representation of the human figure. Moving from a full body representation over time, he starts to focus solely on the human face in the early 70s, painting the human visage as a landscape. Over the years, they morphed into what he called “heads”. Abstract brushstrokes in earthly tones at first glance, they reveal themselves as multiple melancholic faces, layered one on top of the other.