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Lot Essay
The artist of people, the artist of humanity, Louay Kayyali is best-known for his depictions of deprived working-class figures, where the focus is mostly on a solitary figure, featuring typically boys that were forced to work in menial street jobs such as lottery ticket sellers, shoe-shiners and newspaper vendors around Aleppo and Damascus. The artist also depicted young men who chose to roam the city streets instead of attending their classes.
Kayyali was undoubtedly one of the region’s most prominent socio-political artists in the 1960s and 1970s, and his paintings externalise the pressing humanitarian and political issues that surrounded him. His powerful depictions of ordinary people are characterised by the strong black fluid lines that define the figures and the absence of inessential detail. Focusing on these characters, like icons, which is reminiscent of Russian social realist painting, through his humane treatment of his subjects he conferred them with more individuality and pathos. A recurrent theme in his work was the desolation and misery of social outsiders, his trauma finding expression in a series of deeply sentimental paintings.
The present lot from 1960 is a very elegant touching example, where a handsome boy with sad eyes is selling the traditional Syrian ice cream called Booza. Booza is a pounded ice cream mixed with Salep, rose water, and mastic. A very fresh dessert in Middle Eastern hot summer day, these Booza sellers have become a recognizable part of the Syrian urban cultural scene, where kids would run and gather to get their cups’ filled. This present work focuses on this seller enjoying a small moment of melting happiness. Kayyali focused on the need of this cast of people to survive and make a living through selling in the streets, however ice cream, if anything, is not cooling their situation.
Within his oeuvre, Kayyali offered problems with very little room for solutions, making much of his work felt with melancholy and resignation. Provoking society through his works, Kayyali proposed to question the minds of the Syrian Bourgeois at the turn of the country’s independence and its ensuing dreams of finally becoming an independent state with a strong identity without Western influence.
Only seeing the flaws within society, Kayyali reminded his country with these simple subjects and lines, that this supremacy will not be valid if it is only limited to the happy few, proclaiming that a street had a different image and reality to portray. In this case in The Ice Cream Seller, it seems his society needs more than just a tasty ice cream snack to cool themselves on a hot day.
Kayyali was undoubtedly one of the region’s most prominent socio-political artists in the 1960s and 1970s, and his paintings externalise the pressing humanitarian and political issues that surrounded him. His powerful depictions of ordinary people are characterised by the strong black fluid lines that define the figures and the absence of inessential detail. Focusing on these characters, like icons, which is reminiscent of Russian social realist painting, through his humane treatment of his subjects he conferred them with more individuality and pathos. A recurrent theme in his work was the desolation and misery of social outsiders, his trauma finding expression in a series of deeply sentimental paintings.
The present lot from 1960 is a very elegant touching example, where a handsome boy with sad eyes is selling the traditional Syrian ice cream called Booza. Booza is a pounded ice cream mixed with Salep, rose water, and mastic. A very fresh dessert in Middle Eastern hot summer day, these Booza sellers have become a recognizable part of the Syrian urban cultural scene, where kids would run and gather to get their cups’ filled. This present work focuses on this seller enjoying a small moment of melting happiness. Kayyali focused on the need of this cast of people to survive and make a living through selling in the streets, however ice cream, if anything, is not cooling their situation.
Within his oeuvre, Kayyali offered problems with very little room for solutions, making much of his work felt with melancholy and resignation. Provoking society through his works, Kayyali proposed to question the minds of the Syrian Bourgeois at the turn of the country’s independence and its ensuing dreams of finally becoming an independent state with a strong identity without Western influence.
Only seeing the flaws within society, Kayyali reminded his country with these simple subjects and lines, that this supremacy will not be valid if it is only limited to the happy few, proclaiming that a street had a different image and reality to portray. In this case in The Ice Cream Seller, it seems his society needs more than just a tasty ice cream snack to cool themselves on a hot day.