Fayez Barakat (Beyond Belief)

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HANNA BELLA PUBLISHING

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BARAKAT BARAKAT EXHIBITION INCLUDES HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE THEMES FANTASIES, NIRVANA GLOBAL WARMING AND PARADISE

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HANNA BELLA PUBLISHING

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PREFACE Upon meeting Fayez Barakat it is immediate the man is his art.

Colourful, passionate and deep in expression are words that come to mind when considering both he and this collection. When first hearing him talk of his art and the close and intimate relationship he has for each piece it is clear this is something very different.

His paintings explore his interpretations of works from past masters in his own unique way and a constant struggle to develop upon their expression with his own creativity. Standing in front of a Barakat painting is an instant explosion of sensory interaction but when you take the time to allow this initial celebration pass, you see a deeper and more complex expression.

Within this catalogue are examples of some of his favourite paintings but whilst beautifully represented I urge the reader to not deprive themselves of the opportunity and experience of owning and viewing a Barakat in person.

KEVIN PAYNE GALLERY DIRECTOR HAYHILL GALLERY

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BY ANTHONY DOWNEY

To most of us, Fayez Barakat is best known as the world’s most important dealer and collector of ancient art.

His gallery in London is a treasure trove, filled to the brim with fine antiques ranging from Maya crystal skulls to Mogul statuary and Egyptian jewellery. However, and whilst Barakat’s extensive knowledge has helped shape key private and public collections (and to this day he remains a leading scholar in his field), there is another side to Fayez Barakat that is fast becoming apparent: he is a prolific and highly accomplished painter who has managed over the last few years to establish an eclectic and allusive body of work.

Employing an astonishingly wide range of techniques, Fayez

Warming 2023, 2011, that seems to resonate between the form

Barakat explores all the subtleties of the medium of painting

of active meteors showering the earth or bullet shells littering

whilst simultaneously expanding his pictorial field. His mostly

the ground. Other paintings included here, such as Purple

abstract works constantly redefine the limits of his ever-growing

Paradise, 2011, looks towards the paintings of the Austrian

visual language. Articulated around themes such as fantasy,

symbolist Gustav Klimt and yet also pushes Barakat’s own

meditation, ecstasy and euphoria, these works not only embody

visual explorations. For many, Veiled Fantasy 72A, 2011, alludes

Barakat’s visions and feelings, they often engage him in a

to the work of Jackson Pollock; however, as he points out in the

process of transcendence. In the interview included here, the

interview here, it is important that we also see these works as

artist has spoken about the inner energies driving him and the

individual works by the artist. “Undoubtedly, these people have

sense that he becomes a “medium” of sorts channelling ideas

influenced me” Barakat has noted, “but sometimes I feel that I

and techniques in a manner that even surprises the artist himself.

live their experience. I don’t really try to emulate or imitate any

As he notes, it is for him “beyond belief” that he should have so

artist.” For the artist, he is possessed and obsessed by painting

many visions and be so obsessed (if not possessed) by the need

and it is the one thing that, to paraphrase his words enables him

to paint every day.

to engage with bigger issues than himself. Painting here has become a form of meditation upon the world and rumination

For this show at Hayhill Gallery, Fayez Barakat brings together works from the last few years including Marine Life, 2011, a veritable visual celebration of colours that recalls the late impressionism of the French painter Claude Monet, and Global

upon the artist’s role in interpreting it.

ANTHONY DOWNEY PROGRAMME DIRECTOR CONTEMPORARY ART SOTHEBY’S INSTITUTE OF ART

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FAYEZ BARAKAT INTERVIEW BY COLINE MILLIARD

COLINE MILLIARD: You’ve said that you sometimes feel like a “medium” when you paint. Could you expand on this? What do you mean by medium here?

FAYEZ BARAKAT: My paintings are usually done between two and five in the morning. Every night when I go to sleep, I go over the issues of the day and then my mind blanks and it goes into colours. I go into places that sometimes shock me with their vivacity. If an idea has formed in my head, I wake up, go to the studio and almost attack the canvas trying to express myself. A blank canvas is the most exciting thing for me, and painting is a very sensual activity but it is also an emotional and intellectual experience – an experience that is literally beyond belief to any other experience in my life.

I’ve said that I feel like a medium because sometimes I’m so surprised by the work that come out of me that I do not believe I have done it. I do not know where it comes from. Although, I like the expertise of the disciplined artist that went to art school, I’ve personally never been to an art school, but interestingly enough I have art professors asking me to talk to them about some of my techniques. In this show for Hay Hill Gallery, you may have seen four or five techniques across a variety of paintings, but I use more techniques than that and to this end I often feel as if I am channelling ideas and practices through my paintings. To me, each style of these paintings is a challenge, and I strive to experiment and employ different methods.

CM: How do you feel about being a so-called “emerging artist” and how that places you in relation to previous artists and artists working today?

FB: The fact that I’m launching myself as a new artist means that everybody looks at me as if I was an emerging artist. But the paintings I have done exceed in number the production of most artists although I must say much of what I do is by way of preparation for more finished works.

I do realise that quantity is not the issue here I have committed myself to producing work on a regular basis and in a variety of styles so as to put myself to the test, so to speak.

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When I go to museums and look at works by the artists, it challenges my ability to do a better work. It sets me a test.

I was with friends in New York several months ago to see the Monet show at Gegosian Gallery. It was mind-boggling but it is also a challenge: how do you respond to Monet’s masterpieces – how can you offer a response to them?

That is the challenge I set myself, like many before me, both established and emerging as artists.

CM: And that is obviously a challenge that results in different degrees of satisfaction?

FB: Sometimes a good painting can be a very painful experience, and sometimes it can be an exhilarating experience. Why did I choose the themes of meditation, nirvana, euphoria and ecstasy? Because I feel these things each time I’m completing a work.

CM: It seems to be a double process: there’s the moment when you see a combination of colours in your mind, you paint it, and then there’s the post-work ecstasy. You go from one phase to the other through painting. How do you relate these two states? When you’re done, do you feel that you’ve achieved what you set out to do? Or is painting taking you somewhere else?

FB: Each painting takes me onto a different trip. I started practicing yoga as a young man, in my teens. And every now and then, when I feel I need to go deeper within myself, or go out of my body, I meditate. Through meditation, you feel feelings, sense sensations and learn things about yourself that you didn’t know, things that you wished you knew — and, of course, things you wished you didn’t know! I analyse these feelings and try to express them in my paintings. Each one of my works carries a message, and that’s the reason why I categorize them. I give titles to my pieces — Paradise, Meditation, Nirvana, Euphoria, to name but a few — to help my viewers engage further with the work which is, after all, quite abstract.

Each of these paintings has been produced through the influence of a spiritual energy that is beyond my comprehension — again, it is beyond my belief that I can

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produce such works. When I start painting I feel possessed by an energy field; things flow, ideas come non-stop. I can’t start working if I don’t have a minimum of 10 canvases and I prefer to have a hundred canvases at hand because it’s a concert of ideas, of colours, of themes in my mind. I don’t know of any artists that have experimented on such a large scale. If I don’t have the material ready, I feel very frustrated. I need to have everything in place to be able to express myself with a brush, a scalpel, a tube, or a bottle.

CM: When did you start painting like this, with so much energy?

FB: I’ve enjoyed drawing since I was a child. In my teens, I had a friendship with Bella Chagall, grand daughter of Marc Chagall. We became so friendly that I used to go frequently to their home and see her grand father’s paintings everywhere.

There were canvases, brushes and paint everywhere. I used to play around and do things. Marc Chagall would get a kick out of it he was quite interested in what I was doing. Then I had my own studio, I started working, and the Israel museum approached me for a solo show when I was still quite young, in 1968 I think, when I lived in Jerusalem. However, my first wife didn’t like the smell of paint, so I could not paint at home and was working when not at home. When I married my second wife her first condition was: “no painting, no reading, no playing a musical instrument, no writing at home. When you are at home, you have to pay attention to me and to the children”. That was difficult but perhaps fair in retrospect.

After my wife passed away, and perhaps as a way of dealing with it, I picked up brushes and paint and got back to it. And since that moment, if I don’t paint everyday I feel lost.

CM: How do you experiment? Do you go from one technique to the next? Is it guided by your subconscious like your compositions – o you even know what you are going to paint?

FB: It flashes. When I’m with my canvases, I lose it. I’m like a mad man. Sometimes I paint with my fingers, sometimes I paint with my feet, any thing that is around me at that moment becomes a potential tool. Ideas flash into my head. Put me in a department store, and I’ll find things that I can use to paint

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with. I start figuring out instruments that can help me to create interesting patterns, interesting motifs, and I must have them in my studio and be ready to paint when the ideas come.

CM: You use a wide variety of styles, but figuration isn’t really one of them. Why? FB: When I was growing up in Israel, I knew Agam well, as well Jose Stern and Pablo Picasso was a customer of mine for antiquities. Agam and Stern taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and they said to me: “Fayez, you have to come and learn how to paint properly.” I went there, sat among the students, took a board, a pen, and started sketching, but it was very frustrating for me. I can’t follow a disciplined principle of painting. I can show you a few of my figurative works. I’m not excellent at it I must say, but I can draw.

What I’m trying to do, however modestly, is engage with the work of artists like Kandinsky, Miró, and Pollock, all in my own way of course. I’m very fond of all these great masters, I respect them very highly, but I think that through experimentation I have mastered skills and expressed myself in my paintings that rises to some of the challenges set by their respective works.

CM: The work of the artists you just mentioned comes to mind when one sees your paintings. Did they play a role in your artistic formation?

FB: Undoubtedly, these people have influenced me. They are my great teachers. I learnt a lot by seeing their works, and sometimes I feel that I live their experience. I don’t really try to emulate or imitate any artist. When I was a young man people would look at some of my works and say: “this looks like a Kandinsky”, or “this looks like a Jackson Pollock”, which is understandable as these were the artists that inspired me, but they never said that it was me and that devastated me. But now, at this stage of my life, at my level of consciousness and knowledge of art as a broad field of endeavour, I see my work in a totally different light. Set me loose and I create small miracles in my mind. I’m possessed and obsessed by painting and it is the one thing that enables me to engage with bigger issues than myself.

CM: In your paintings, there is usually a monochromatic background and a layer of shapes, cryptic, code-like signs.

The canvas could also be understood as a stage, on which the shapes act as characters in a play. Do you see your canvas as stage? Or is your work more about the creation of a visual language?

FB: It’s a combination of all these things. My former exposure to ancient art and ancient languages, scripts, geometric patterns and symbols, has always influenced me and affected me very deeply. In some of my works, I go into a totally different dimension. Look at my “marine” series, I’ve never dived, but when I go to sleep these colours pop up and they drive me to the canvas. When I produce a painting, it is a way of transcending myself, to a certain extent, and a process that leads to bliss. I wish I could live 200 years so as to experience this every day!

CM: This also goes back to what you were saying earlier: one loses oneself in the moment. There’s a sense of transcendence. One is just a vessel through which something passes. This is very interesting, bearing in mind that you are known to be the leading collector and dealer of ancient art in the world, and suddenly there’s a secret life emerging out of that moment – which people find surprising.

FB: Yes, I know this confuses people: I have worked for many years in antiquities and now suddenly this, I am painting and painting and producing works from where I do not know. As I said they surprise me, sometimes they even disconcert me but, as I said, I am possessed by this need to paint and know no other way of attaining this sense of wellbeing.

CM: When do you know that a painting is finished?

FB: I hear a ring in my head, and something opens in my heart. Then I know I am finished.

UK EDITOR FOR MODERN PAINTERS AND ARTINFO IS

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Magnificent Marine Life | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 152cm | |

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Nirvana 66 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 152cm | |

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Vieled Fantasy 72 A | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 91cm x 183cm | |

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Veiled Fantasy 72 B | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 91cm x 183cm |

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Global Warming 2023 A | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 152cm x 122cm | |

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Beyond Belief 1 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 152cm x 122cm | |

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Beyond Belief 2 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 152cm x 122cm | |

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Purple Paradise | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 152cm | |

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Fantasy 55 L | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 183cm x 91cm |

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Fantasy 44 L | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 183cm x 91cm |

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Alien Calligraphy | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 91cm x 122cm | |

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Emerald Fantasy 1 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 100cm x 100cm | |

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Cosmic Fantasy 24 KL | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 78cm x 91cm |

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Nautical Dream | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 71cm x 91cm |

Marine Fantasy 55 W | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 122cm | |

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Global Warming 78 K | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 91cm x 183cm | |

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Lilac Fantasy | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 122cm |

Sandstorm Fantasy | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 152cm x 122cm | |

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Global Warming 48 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 122cm | |

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Stella Paradise | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 122cm | |

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Lapis Paradise 1 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 122cm | |

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Cosmic Fantasy | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 122cm | |

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Wilhelmenia | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 122cm | |

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Coral Fantasy | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 91cm |

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Saskia in Paradise | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 122cm x 91cm | |

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Emerald Fantasy 2 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 100cm x 100cm | |

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Forest Fantasy 2 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 100cm x 100cm |

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Nirvana 36 H | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 91cm x 91cm | |

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Global Warming Iceland 40 Q | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 101cm x 101cm | |

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Global Warming in the North Pole | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 71cm x 91cm |

Global Warming 41 H | 2011 | OIl on canvas | 76cm x 76cm | |

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Global warming 2019 MM | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 102cm x 102cm | |

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Global in New Orleans | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 71cm x 91cm |

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Global Warming 2019 | 2011 | Mixed media on canvas | 102cm x 102cm | |

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Golden Nirvana | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 91cm x 91cm |

Alex’s Fanatsy | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 152cm x 122cm | |

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Red Paradise 1 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 76cm x 122cm | |

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PInk Paradise 1 | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 76cm x 122cm | |

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Monet Meadow | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 102cm x 102cm | |

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Nirvana 39 KL | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 77cm x 77cm | |

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Nirvana 46 KL | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 77cm x 77cm | |

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Sera’s Dream | 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 76cm x 122cm |

Nirvana 44 A | 2011 | Oil on canvas | 100cm x 100cm | |

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PREFACE KEVIN PAYNE

PHOTOGRAPHY KEVIN PAYNE

INTRODUCTION ANTHONY DOWNEY

DESIGN PETER KEENAN

INTERVIEW COLINE MILLIARD

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