The Voice
I didn't wake up one day and decide to be an artist.
I just never stopped drawing what wouldn't leave my head.
Cities I walked through, people I loved and lost, rooms filled with noise and silence at the same time — they all stayed with me. The canvas became the only place wide enough to hold them without explanation.
For fifty years I've been negotiating with these images. I cover them, scrape them, bring them back again in a different light. A man at a table. A figure in a suit. A crowd seen from above. They are not memories of one country or one moment; they are the weight of a whole life, compressed into scenes.
Mr. Y was born from that weight. He stands in for the ones who can't speak, or who chose to stay quiet. Sometimes he is the victim, sometimes the witness, sometimes the one responsible. I paint him when questions are louder than answers.
A painting is finished when it stops belonging only to me.
When someone else stands in front of it and feels something they can't fully name — that's when the work has done its job.
The Journey
I have lived most of my life between worlds — between past and present, between a country that stayed on the map and another that now only exists in memory. Those shifts changed my eyes before they changed my address.
For decades, my studio has been the one place that does not move. Sketchbooks, photographs, fragments of headlines, family stories, all of them feed the work. My journey is not a straight line of exhibitions and dates. It is the slow, stubborn decision to keep painting when it would have been easier to turn away.
If you are reading this, you probably recognize that feeling — of carrying more history inside you than fits in a single life.
The Style
Rayyes' paintings live somewhere between realism and memory. Figures appear and disappear inside dense compositions: men in suits, women at windows, anonymous silhouettes seated around tables that could be anywhere and anytime. The scenes feel familiar, but not completely safe.
At the center of many works stands Mr. Y — a recurring figure who is everyone and no one. He is the witness, the negotiator, the man caught between power and conscience. Through him, Rayyes can talk about politics, loss, love, and compromise without turning the work into illustration. The palette shifts from muted grays to burning reds and deep blues, but the tension remains: intimacy on the surface, history underneath.
The Process
I work in layers — of paint, but also of time. Some pieces come alive quickly. Others wait for years before they let me see what they want to become. I cover, erase, scratch, and repaint until the surface feels like a lived place, not a clean idea.
What you see in the end is not a single moment. It is fifty years of looking, doubting, correcting, and refusing to forget. A thousand small decisions made and unmade until the painting can stand on its own feet.
I return to a canvas again and again, not to perfect it, but to understand it. When it finally stops asking me questions, that's when it is ready to meet someone else.
"I return to a canvas again and again—not to finish it, but to understand it."
Stay close to the process.
First look at new works, unseen sketches, and personal reflections from Rayyes — only when the story moves forward.