Rafic Charaf (1932-2003) was a Lebanese painter. Born in Baalbek, in the Bekaa valley, he enrolled at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (Alba) and then obtained a grant from the Spanish government to pursue his studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. During his stay in Spain, he was impregnated by the works of Goya and Picasso, whose influence would be considerable in his work. Upon his return to Lebanon, he developed a painting practice that the critics hailed as very personal, dark and melancholic.  

This landscape was executed between 1969 and 1970 and belongs to a corpus of paintings dominated by dark shades of grey. They feature elements such as a lightless sun, broken barbed wires and eventually dead or dying birds over a large and otherwise empty territory. 

This series has been considered a milestone in Charaf’s œuvre and in the history of the Lebanese landscape. It shifts from the topographical and impressionist views that were the standards for decades to the idea of a socially and politically charged view. Charaf grew up in a region of dry and austere plains that was far from the development and modernization that benefited the country’s major urban centres. The harsh living conditions generated in the 1960s and 70s massive rural flight and social tensions. This landscape is deeply rooted in these earthy conditions. The soil is deprived under a ferocious sun and the countryside is seen as a prison with barbed wires.