“But all the foregoing (besides sharing the defect of not
existing) are mere optical instruments. The faithful who come to the Amr mosque
in Cairo, know very well that the universe lies inside one of the stone columns
that surround the central courtyard. …No one, of course, can see it, but those
who put their ear to the surface claim to hear, within a short time, the
bustling rumor of it. …The mosque dates to the seventh century; the columns
were taken from other, pre-Islamic, temples, for as ibn-Khaldun has written: in the
republics founded by nomads, the attendance of foreigners is essential for all
those things that bear upon masonry.”
Jorge Luis
Broges, The Aleph and Other Stories
If, by persistently looking in one direction,
you can see, hanging near a goddess or a nymph, a mediaeval map drawn by
twelfth century geographer Mohammad al-Idrisi; if this goddess or this nymph is
Circe, daughter of Helios, god of the sun, and Perse, the Oceanid; if she is
represented as she was during the century of the romantics, in the
Pre-Raphaelite style, holding a cup full of a magic potion intended for
Odysseus; if she is assisted by an attractive yet peculiar contemporary woman;
if you realize that Odysseus himself is not Odysseus anymore but the member of
one of the fundamentalist groups of our troubled times, roaming the regions
outlined in al-Idrisi’s map, where south is up; if you can discern a slender
woman, with long purple hair that cascades to her feet; if this sexy martial
art fighter, this Japanese Manga hero is Uncho Kanu, and if she pretends to be
– or perhaps actually is – Circe the Greek; if all these objects, people and
symbols belong to different stories; if they simultaneously belong to the past,
the present and even the future; if they appear to you slightly altered and
tell stories they never told before; if you can see all of these objects,
symbols and people, and maybe a few others, in just one glimpse, then, there is
no doubt, you are in a narrative derived from the imagination of Mohammad El Rawas, the raconteur, the Maker of Realities.
 |
| Circe's Assistant, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 140/150cm, 2014 |
Magical Realism is what best describes El
Rawas’ complex constructions – or should we say ‘deconstructions’. Each one of
his compositions is a layered assemblage of objects and techniques, ideas and
references. He borrows, modifies, alters, copies, pastes, reinterprets and
decontextualizes objects and concepts he finds in the history of art from
Italian renaissance to contemporary art, through haute couture and fashion,
comics, architecture and photography. El Rawas' juxtaposition of styles, genres
and techniques, at times brutal and uncomfortable, always surprising, mirrors
the intertextuality and absurdity of our contemporary life. He even orders
online the sexy figurines of manga characters that
populate his works, turning the act of art creation itself into the most
postmodern of our everyday life activities: Internet shopping.
 |
Joseph Cornell, Medici Boy,
Construction, 1942-52 |
By introducing a third dimension to his works
in the 1980s, Mohammad El Rawas takes the art of assemblage as forged by American artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) to the realm of Magical Realism. For his "Medici Boy", for example, Cornell borrows Pinturicchio’s famous “Portrait of a Boy” (c. 1500). The box, the juxtaposition of objects, the borrowing, everything evokes a Cornell-Rawas filiation. Mohammad El Rawas is thus part of the tradition of postmodern artists who borrow and decontextualize images shaped by others to combine them with their own creations. In 2013 El Rawas abandons painting to
work on creating a series of three-dimensional constructions using multiple
materials and techniques. In his latest artistic phase, he goes back to
two-dimensional paintings. By doing so, and painting with striking realism the
objects, real or imagined, altered or accurate, he juxtaposes on his canvases,
he takes the art of assemblage, the process of deconstruction and the idea of
Magical Realism to a whole new level of virtuosity.
Remarkably, by looking at the art of Mohammad El
Rawas through the lenses of literature, one can further
apprehend his talent as a raconteur. Indeed, El Rawas’ audacious amalgams and
borrowings resemble French writer Michel Houellebecq's use of intertextuality
and pastiche, while the peculiar atmospheres of the imaginary worlds generated
by these very amalgams evoke yet another writer, Japanese novelist Haruki
Murakami. Like these two authors, El Rawas epitomizes Postmodernism in its most
accessible and understandable dimensions. All three contemporary artists excel
at the art of deconstruction.
 |
The Saga of a Reclining Model, Oil, Acrylic,
Mixed media and Assemblage on Plywood panel, 90/89/3cm, 2009 |
For French philosopher Jacques Derrida who
coined the concept, ‘deconstruction’ is not the process of ‘undoing
construction’; there is a word for that, it is ‘destruction’. Deconstruction is
the amalgam of two words i.e. destruction and construction. Therefore, a
process where destruction and construction
take place simultaneously is a process of deconstruction. It is a process through which the artist, by inflicting
destruction on something, constructs something else. That's what El Rawas does
in a composition like “The Saga of a Reclining Model”,
Houellebecq in a novel like “The Map and the Territory”,
and Murakami in his monumental “1Q84”. Consequeltly, Houellebecq’s literary assemblages and
Murakami’s juxtapositions
of unrealistic tableaux produce an all too Rawas-ian puzzling uneasiness.
Michel Houellebecq masters the subtle art of
borrowing and decontextualizing the styles of authors that predated him. The
reader can find in his texts accents suggesting Balzac in a sentence like “Et
si le voyageur éphémère veut bien rappeler à sa mémoire...”,
Camus in the beginning of the sentence “Assisté
à la mort d’un type, aujourd’hui...”,
Lautréamont in some of his poetic descriptions of rural France, etc.
Houellebecq also makes use of texts he finds outside literature per
se. He borrows from sources as diverse as
advertising, recipes, math problems or the user’s manuals of electronic
devices. He advocates the use of all sorts of ‘raw materials’ in literature. In
“The Map and the Territory”, he copied from Wikipedia a description of how
flies have sex. He argues that taking passages word for word is not stealing as
long as the motives are to recycle them for artistic purposes. His whole style
is based on borrowing banal and technical descriptions from everyday life and
weaving them into something artistic.
 |
Inclinations, Oil, Acrylic, Mixed media and Assemblage
on Plywood panel, 109/99/6.50cm, 2010 |
Haruki Murakami uses creative writing
techniques to create altered atmospheres loaded with conspicuous sexual
tensions. In his monumental best seller, 1Q84 is an alternate version of year
1984 with an obvious reference to George Orwell. In 1Q84, two moons instead of
one are hanging in the sky and the same causes do not produce the same effects.
The Sakigake cult described in the novel is a historical
reference to the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which was responsible for the Sarin gas
attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The abrupt
speech patterns of 17-year-old dyslexic high school student Fuka-Eri is
compensated for by the enthralling shape of her breasts, while part-time
assassin Aomame, the main female protagonist who thinks her breasts are
asymmetrical, has an unbridled sex life with older men she meets in Tokyo’s
bars and hotels. Like Murakami, El Rawas makes use of sexual
tension and historical or artistic references to create the peculiar
atmospheres of his assemblages.
The concomitant use by El Rawas of techniques
as opposed as photorealism and surrealism, resonates with the world of Magical
Realism, of which some characteristic features are the mingling and
juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time
shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous
use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic
descriptions, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the
horrific and the inexplicable. The use of different materials found in places
that do not naturally belong together, the mysteries left unresolved, the
hentai-like sexual tensions, the altered, foreign yet familiar atmospheres,
immerse the Rawas reader in a throbbing comfortable discomfort.
A short version of this text was published in
Mohammad El Rawas’ catalogue ‘Apotheosis of Woman’ that accompanied the solo exhibition
of the artist at Agial art gallery in Beirut, in May 2016.
