“Orientalism by Edward Said has influenced a lot of the discourse in my art,” says Paris-based painter Rayan Yasmineh of this 1978 scholarly text. “For me, as for him, the Orient and Occident were created with any differences accentuated to justify domination of one over the other. The reality is that the Arab and European worlds have the same origin in old Mesopotamia. In my paintings I make the link between the art of representation in the Islamic world and European world and mix them, flat style, as a way to express the similarities between these supposedly opposite worlds.”

The artist grew up between Paris and Amman before he and his family relocated to Toulouse where he passed his scientific baccalaureate. He then studied at the elite art school, École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts à la Villa Arson – famed for its abstract style. “I was very attached to figures so it was good for me to be confronted with different ideas. My practice today is because of my time at The Villa Arson and discovering the problematics of modern occidental painting. The rejection of illusion and description of painting as just colour on a flat surface was amazing for me because it could be describing old Islamic styles.”

After graduating with congratulations of the jury, Yasmineh went on to complete his masters at The Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2022, again with congratulations of the jury. It was at this moment that French-Algerian photographer Sofiane-Vincent Méloni captured these beautiful portraits of the artist, featured on Nataal. Now represented by mor charpentier gallery, this emerging talent has already been awarded the Lefranc Bourgeois Prize, the Carré sur Seine Prize and the Hatvany Collective Prize. His oil on canvas works have been shown at Institut des Cultures d’Islam 2022, the Beaux-Arts de Paris 2022, Poush Manifesto 2021 and he’s currently working towards a solo show for 2024. He has also been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, with Nils Vandevenne, as part of the Camus project.

Listening to Yasmineh talk about his practice is as fascinating as it is educational. His thoughtful descriptions are woven with his personal heritage, global histories and ancient myths. It’s reflective of just how multilayered and rich in storytelling his work is.

By fusing Middle Eastern culture and Mesopotamian iconography with contemporary Western identities and realities, he’s not only highlighting how closely woven global civilisations truly are, but also astutely commenting upon today’s political and ideological divides.

On art’s relationship to truth-telling, he says: “In all of my paintings I make the link between mythological events and historical events. For me, paintings and mythology are the same distance from reality. When you see a painting, you don't see reality. It's the same with a myth, when you read Homer's ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’, you know that it's a story. But when you read a historian's book – even if history has evolved and changed and it's known that it can be used with malintent – their book is seen as a restitution of facts. It's the same with photography – during a trial a photo can be used as evidence. Photographers are dangerous in this sense, you can lie with photography. But you cannot lie with paintings because everyone knows it's not the truth.”

His hyper-realistic portraits are posed against heavily patterned backdrops that are free from shadow. “In Islamic art, every colour is isolated from the other. There is no shadow, no light, no illusion, just colours assembled in a certain way,” he explains. “This idea was imposed on civilisations who were, until that point, really attached to representing reality. Iconography was important in both the Byzantine and Persian empires. Artists got around this problem by understanding iconoclasm as only the mimicking of illusion being blasphemous. We can represent reality but only in a way that it is obvious that it's an illusion.” This combination of techniques taken from supposedly opposite worlds he describes as “the manifestation of a plural identity, Arab and European, which breaks with the supposed adversity of the concepts of East and West.”

The three figures that appear most frequently in his work are the artist himself and his two brothers. “When I represent my brothers in my paintings, I make them mythological heroes. It captures my little history as well as mythology.” His work ‘Le songe de Gilgamesh’ (2021) depicts his younger brother at their family home in Toulouse, his casual attire seemingly at odds with his richly ornamented surroundings. “He always reclines on the sofa like that in just his joggers looking almost like a masculine odalisque. And the patterns on the carpet and the dishes are from my mother's interior design,” he says. “There are a lot of reference to miniatures, which you can see in the problem of perspective; the table and curtain are very flat with no shadow or light. I have made him Gilgamesh because it's the first traditional epoch in the world, which was written in Mesopotamia and is the common origin for European, Arab and other cultures.”

His self-portrait ‘Autoportrait au turban et veste adidas, lève-toi Jerusalem’ (2019) is inspired by Rembrandt's ‘Belshazzar's Feast’ and makes contemporary comment on today’s crimes against Palestine. “The fact I am raising my right finger is symbolic. In Christianity you see depictions of Christ with his right finger raised and in Raphael's Plato, he too has his finger raised pointing towards the world of ideals – there is continuation of Plato's philosophy in all Abrahamic faiths. This finger is also important in the Islamic tradition with the Shahadah and pointing towards God. Palestinians were the first to use this finger as a way of protesting – in the first intifada they would raise that finger to express that we have God and will not fall to the colonisers. The shape of my hand is in between a raised finger and a stone in the hand. And my position is opposite to that of Balthazar in Rembrandt’s painting, like the men of Jerusalem against the Babylonian oppressor. In this way I make links between the exile of Hebrews and the exile of Palestinians.”

Meanwhile in ‘Cyrus et l'odeur du lys’ (2019) he depicts his older brother as Cyrus, who freed Jerusalem from the oppression of Babylonia. His is a confident pose, the gaze meeting the viewer straight on. “You can see the link between the old Jerusalem and Jerusalem now with the Dome of the Rock. And we can see the wall separating Palestine from Israel. It's a link between a historical event and mythology, and history as documentation. It's important for me as a Palestinian to assert that these stories in the Old Testament or Torah are also my traditions and my culture. I can justify that with more political rhetoric against colonialism and occupation, but that's another story.”