Laysa Issam al Fannan,

whose large scale paintings and assemblage sculptures satirize the unthinking cultural orthodoxies that infect every aspect of our daily lives, has been sampling the genius of others for more than fifty years. As a young, socially conscious artist who was deeply troubled by the racial, political and environmental turbulence of the sixties and early seventies, Fannan set aside their art career and spent more than three decades as a religious cleric teaching ethics and moral justice, until disillusionment with the religion business led them out of the world of faith and back to a life of, as they label, it “honest artifice.” Now, having been steeped in the symbols and semantics of religious doctrine, Fannan dismantles the folly of priestcraft with the bona fides of an insider and the Duchampian irony of an excommunicated heretic.

Since returning to art-making, their prolific output has remained largely unseen by and unknown to all but a few enthusiastic collectors. So disinclined toward personal publicity is this reclusive artist, that not only is their name a self-deprecating joke, but even this website had to be initiated by some of their supporters. Their monastic dedication to the development of their vision rather than a professional reputation has left them relatively unknown and undiscovered by the art world at large.

Fannan’s engaging oeuvre exhibits ample evidence of years spent honing not only the craft of painting and sculpture but also a profoundly cerebral wit that exposes even the most entrenched hypocrisy and delusion. Fannan dances effortlessly through the perilous minefields of our religious, artistic and political conventions with multifaceted humor and gentle ambiguity. Before anyone notices that they have been there, the sacred cows have all been milked.

In a world fast becoming a volatile crucible of conflicting secular and religious orthodoxies, Laysa Issam al Fannan is a voice crying in the wilderness - a serial trickster, on whom we would do well to keep an eye.