Anas Albraehe
Anas ALBRAEHE (Born in Syria in 1991. Lives in Lebanon and in France)
Thierry Savatier
Anas Al Braehe is a Syrian artist born in 1991, the youngest of a family living in a rural region ,where life is still punctuated by agricultural work. After obtaining a degree in painting and drawing at the University of Fine Arts in Damascus in 2014, he moved to Beirut where he completed, in 2015, a master’s degree in psychology and art therapy at the Lebanese University. He currently lives in Lebanon, where he practices painting and theatrical performance.
Deeply attached to his country of origin, he draws his sources of inspiration from the heart of the environment in which he lives, from the beings he meets or frequents, as well as from his own experience. His paintings can be read as testimonies; he is a painter of memory and of the present. From his deliberately rich and colorful palette, which is reminiscent of Gauguin, Matisse (especially for portraits) and could be an extension of Fauvism - from which he adopts two major aesthetic traits, large flat areas and absence of perspective - , he acutely explores the women of Suweyda, his Syrian village, in their daily agricultural tasks. For him, these peasant women live in harmony with nature; he also perceives in them the function of “transmitter” that they occupy in the transmission of the multi-millennial notion of fertility (Mother Earth). No doubt he sees them closer to the Paleolithic Venuses than to Ishtar, however, since their role seems to us to be nurturing and not linked to war.
Another series that the artist devotes to a neighbor with Down syndrome in her forties (Manal), who we feel plays for him as much the role of muse as of model, is imbued with a staggering humanity. The painter thinks, probably rightly, that the vibration of colors reflects states of mind that escape consciousness and are only revealed in the eye of the viewer. This explains the extreme empathy expressed in the genre scenes and portraits executed by this benevolent and attentive observer of what is most fascinating in human beings: otherness.
Moreover, which testifies to the thematic diversity that animates him, Anas Al Braehe lays on the canvas, without any voyeurism, the deep sleep of refugee workers, alone or in small groups, so exhausted by their day that they do not take no more time to take off their clothes to fall asleep (The Dream Catcher) on improvised pallets. He does not approach this theme superficially, because it would be a phenomenon in keeping with the times: having devoted a year of his life as a volunteer to the service of refugees, he knows his subject in depth, translates with his brush the stakes and the emotions. His characters, represented without concession to the Handsome Seducer, willingly recall the realistic intentions of Gustave Courbet painting The Stone Breakers or The Gypsy Girl and Her Children, or those of Picasso of the Blue Period, who had signed one of his self-portraits Painter of human misery.
His most recent paintings, from the “Bab Alhawa - Gate of the Wind” series - name of the border post that separates Syria from Turkey -, are also devoted to refugees, but this time captured on their journey to exile. The artist is interested here in women, adolescents and children seated or, most often, asleep in the dumpsters of trucks that transport them randomly from conflicts to quieter areas. He chooses to paint them in this delimited space, lying in the middle of voluminous bundles cut in fabrics of bright colors, formerly quite frequent in the Levantine countryside. The spectator understands that these packets not only constitute their viaticum but that they ultimately contain the only personal property that they have been able to save. A whole life reduced to a bag...
Of course, we can rightly establish a link between their sleep and fatigue, or even the fulfillment of a natural biological rhythm. However, Anas Albraehe maintains an interesting aesthetic paradox between the dark personal situation of these refugees and the shimmering chromatic environment that surrounds them, where the most ardent reds and yellows dominate. The maintained contrast suggests to the viewer an interpretation that takes him beyond appearances. Because sleep is not limited to its restorative function; it is also the privileged medium of dreams. What are these tossed characters thinking about? Perhaps they are responding to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous invitation: "Make your life a dream, and a dream a reality"? Oneirism within oneirism… Perhaps they could say, like Léon-Paul Fargue: “I dreamed so much that I am no longer from here”? Perhaps they are simply thinking of the happiness of returning home and resuming their lives, prior to the chaos that threw them on the roads. No one can tell. However, one certainty is essential, which spares a part of hope: as one can guess, fate deprived them of their possessions, took them away from their land of origin, separated them from their families; however, he will remain powerless to cut them off from their dreams.