Osama Alrayyan

Critical text

In his paintings, Osama Alrayyan (b. 1995, Damascus) often depicts solitary figures against the faintest traces of scenery. Some merge with their backgrounds, collapsing the distinction between portraiture and landscape. The soft hues with which Alrayyan renders exaggerated facial features in his canvases and drawings imbue his images with a magical quality, as if his characters belonged to folklore or fables. Yet beneath this fantasised affection lies a lived reality of displacement and asylum that links an individual s journey, or plight, to natural surroundings (often the setting for moral tales) limited by borders and ever more politicised.

Text by Saim Demircan, Maurin Dietrich

The artist’s voice

I work over the same subject again and again, almost as if I was sculpting. I overpaint it and overpaint it again, then I delete it, to finally receive this feeling that there is a lot of layers.