Soir by Raya Mansoor
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 90 x 200 cm
Year: 2026
Price: $5200.00 USD
Status: available
I wanted it to feel like an evening you could almost step into, the point in the day when the sun begins to leave, colours deepen and the landscape asks for a slower kind of attention. Soir is about that in-between moment, when you are left to decide what the day meant. _____ Avi by Raya Mansoor is a series born from the warmth of the islands, where the sun touches everything: the ocean, the land, and the people who call it home. It is about life lived under that constant light, felt in quiet mornings, in the movement of the sea, and in the golden hours that bring each day to a close. It is about all that it creates. The shifting colours of the water, the bursts of blooms and hidden life, and the memories of growing up in its glow.
Why collect this work?
A pale, arched field compresses botanical silhouettes and broad colour masses, presenting evening as a threshold between legible landscape and abstraction.
- Mansoor calls her practice intuitive and process-led. Here, that intention corresponds with forms that remain open-ended, shifting between leaves, terrain and upright bodies of colour.
- In the photograph, a slender flowering stem rises against heavier vertical forms, while pointed leaves cross their edges. The narrow format stresses ascent, but overlapping planes prevent a stable sense of distance.
- The catalogue records oil on canvas. Oil can accommodate both gradual transitions and sharper contours, possibilities reflected in the juxtaposition of softly modulated passages with clearly bounded foliage.
- The painting is a useful point of encounter between botanical depiction and abstraction because its plant forms do more than identify a subject: they organize scale, depth and visual rhythm.
About the Artist
Raya Mansoor
Raya Mansoor is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: Painting. Based in Malé, MV.
Nationality: Maldivian
I work with color and form as a way of exploring movement, memory, and place.
