“Portrait of a man in rear view” depicts my Moroccan-Egyptian grandfather, who was undocumented for many years, in a small flat in Paris before yet another emigration experience to New York and then Los Angeles, where I was born.

As for many migrant families, food remains a way of recalling our own identities amid the tumult of our displacements. Woven into the painting are two actual handwritten family recipes from long ago. A faded recipe from my grandfather’s grandfather in Arabic offers a
meandering path toward our sesame biscuits. Another French-language recipe recalls a tajine from before my family moved to Egypt from Morocco. The measurements for the ingredients are imprecise; it is impossible to recall precisely the flavor of an integral home.
This is made manifest in the ever-distant lighthouses of Alexandria, Egypt and the Moroccan northern coast beyond the echelons of open doors.

On the table, between the food and its inherent symbolism are North African women celebrating and stories of warrior queens that are linked to the specific cultural and superstitious meanings of the foods we eat, altered by the different ingredients found in Los Angeles and indeed our own generational forgetting.

- Massoud Hayoun.