Born in Aley, Mount Lebanon, Aref El Rayess (1928-2005) travelled widely across Europe, the US, Africa and the Arab world where he created an expansive oeuvre that continues to act as commentary and critical reflection upon the many places he has lived and worked. Regarded as a precocious figure, artistic creation for El Rayess was a vital means to present his ideas around humanity, identity, and nature that he first begun as a self-taught artist at age eleven and continued for the remainder of his life, solidifying his significant role in the history of modern Lebanese art.

Situated in Lebanon in 1972, El Rayess painted the present work at a time when he was heavily occupied with political disappointment, for his manifesto Ma’ man wa-dud man? (With whom and against whom?) published in the same year presented a searing commentary on the Lebanese political system’s corruption that ultimately contributed to the Civil War. Unapologetically confrontational in his denunciation of injustice and addressal of conflict observable in his earliest drawing Horror (1945) – which depicted Hiroshima’s atomic bomb – El Rayess’ political commentary only sharpened following the Arab defeat of 1967; entering the 1970s, El Rayess’ artistic creation focused on the decadence of nations, the tyranny of leaders, and the tragedies of war, noticeable in the artist’s 1971 series Blood and Freedom.

In the present work, a body of liquid – likely petrol – dominates the lowermost section, with an outstretched arm holding a fire torch in the foreground. In constructing this scene, El Rayess appears to be addressing the precarious political situation in his home country. Incorporating folkloric and mystic motifs in the present work, The World of Petrol points to El Rayess’ 1954-1956 period in Senegal where he explored the religious and cultural milieu of the local tribes with whom he lived, and whose visual traditions would become notable features throughout his career such as in the faces depicted in the present work referencing African masks. Noticeable, also, in The World of Petrol are the expressive abilities and the enhanced aesthetic level that the artist refers to as being nurtured through his forays into mime and comedy during his time in Paris.

The subject and composition of The World of Petrol were notably experimented with by El Rayess as seen in his two works From the Third World (1973) and From Visions of the Third World (1974). In the former, El Rayess has portrayed subservient figures with vacuous faces, crowding the composition’s architectural structures, with two people even responsible for maintaining the shackles around the bound figure. In the latter work - El Rayess’ Vision - the constructed world appears to be collapsing and broken into by the people that crowd the sea of petrol; struggling, but succeeding, El Rayess shows them beginning to break open the structures that fix the shackles in place. Painting these two works in the same period that The World of Petrol was completed presents unique insight into the artist’s preoccupations at the time, and it is possible that they informed changes to the present work after El Rayess first deemed it completed in 1973. Overpainting the date in 1974, it seems likely that the artist adjusted the painting prior to its exhibition at the First Biennial of Arab Art held in Baghdad that year.

For El Rayess, Lebanon occupied a crucial position personally and artistically; it was in Beirut he wished to settle in the 1960s following time in Rome and Florence, though a scholarship to the US for his 1964 World Fair Commission did not allow this. The artist travelled to New York, where he exhibited two sculptures commissioned by the Lebanese government, before spending the following three years travelling throughout the United States. Returning to Lebanon in 1967, El Rayess was instrumental in building the Lebanese arts and gallery scene which was lacking in the 1960s, one notable connection being his mentorship to Helen Khal (lot 4) who was co-founder of the greatly important Gallery One. Moreover, his tenure as Chairman of the Lebanese Association of Artists and Sculptors from 1969-1977 and academic positions in Beirut reflect the significant influence El Rayess held on Beirut’s burgeoning art scene and upon the city’s future artistic generations.

As an artist who has rejected classification, El Rayess has constructed an oeuvre with a visual vocabulary uniquely able to traverse periods and movements with his deployment of figuration, expressionism, symbolism, and geometrical abstraction across a range of media. Offering a rare opportunity to acquire El Rayess’ work beyond his Saudi Arabian landscapes and Sand paintings, The World of Petrol presents the artist at his most piercing and uncompromising.