“My artistic practice can be understood as an act of cultural reclamation. It is about reconnecting with a heritage to which access has been partially obstructed by political realities, exile, and displacement. Reclaiming this memory through artistic creation thus becomes a political act.”

1. BIOGRAPHY

Rayan Yasmineh graduated with the congratulations of the jury from the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Villa Arson in Nice. His work freely appropriates the codes of art history, consciously fluctuating between the perpetuation of tradition and the breach of conventions. In his portraits, he combines Middle Eastern culture, Mesopotamian myths, and iconography with contemporary Western identities. His paintings bring together a profusion of ornamental details and shimmering colors with masterful construction of lines and planes.

His understanding of painting is that the physicality of the work and the processes that led to it are as important as the subject matter itself. This conceptual approach is influenced by the French avant-garde movement Support/Surfaces, which reimagined the place of art in society and formally deconstructed and examined the material components of painting. Yasmineh also refers to Maurice Denis’s statement that a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order. His practice revives the tradition of the exuberant gardens of Persian miniature, characterized by an abundance of elements, the association of precise drawing, and pure colors. However, he also views these miniatures as representations of reality that are aware of being representations, thus circumventing Islamic aniconism.

Rayan Yasmineh finds in ancient myths the common ground for many civilizations and a way to connect them. He is interested in how they relate to conflict and how they can condition our perception of reality in the present. By introducing anachronistic, contemporary, and everyday life references among the profusion of ornamental details of Oriental heritage, or by using oil paint in the manner of the Flemish old masters, he intertwines techniques and representations of supposedly opposite worlds. Yasmineh mixes elements that come from his everyday reality — which anchor the viewer to the factual aspect of the painting — with pictorial accents that address the myth. “The expression of this double iconography in my work is the manifestation of a plural identity, Arab and European, which breaks with the supposed adversity of the concepts of East and West.”

His works have been featured at institutions such as Villa Medici, Roma (2025); Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2023); MOCO, Montpellier (2023); the Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2022); the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2022); and Poush Manifesto, Paris (2021). He has been awarded the Mezzanine Sud Prize, the Lefranc Bourgeois Prize, the Carré sur Seine Prize, and the Hatvany Collective Prize. In 2021, he received, alongside Nils Vandevenne, the call for projects from the Ministry of Culture for a public commission as part of the Camus project.