Willy Aractingi

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Willy Aractingi developed a distinctive pictorial language that merged the narrative impulse of illustration with a sophisticated sense of chromatic balance. Initially self-taught and working outside formal academic structures, he returned to painting in Beirut after a long interruption devoted to family and professional responsibilities. His artistic practice matured in close dialogue with the modernist milieu he had fostered as a gallerist, exhibiting figures such as Fassianos, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Alan Davies. From the early 1980s, Aractingi devoted himself entirely to painting, refining a visual idiom rooted in humour, fantasy, and allegory. His most ambitious undertaking, the full illustration of Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables, occupied him between 1989 and 1995 and encapsulated both his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Aractingi’s canvases bring to life hybrid creatures and imaginary landscapes through luminous fields of saturated colour, combining narrative clarity with a deliberately naïve sensibility. While his work has often been compared to that of Douanier Rousseau and Gauguin, his chromatic harmonies and compositional rhythm remain unmistakably personal. The trajectory of his oeuvre shows a gradual shift from modest, intuitive studies to larger, more structurally complex compositions. Throughout his career, Aractingi produced around 1,500 paintings that weave together private mythology, travel impressions, Lebanese folklore, and urban scenes from Cairo, Chicago, and Miami. His mature style, marked by subtle gradations of colour and a deliberate simplification of form, achieves a poetic equilibrium between playfulness and formal discipline. In 2017, the Sursock Museum in Beirut organised a major retrospective, Les Mondes de Willy Aractingi, following the donation of over 200 works by the artist’s family - an event that reaffirmed his place within the modern Lebanese canon.