BEIRUT: Marwan Rechmaoui’s first solo exhibition in more than a decade resembles none of the work for which the artist has become known.

Since the late 1990s, Rechmaoui, now 47, has produced just four major pieces, all of them imposing, large-scale sculptural works that manipulate a viewer’s sense of volume and scale.

The new show, by contrast, features mostly delicate, diminutive paintings by the dozen, surprising not only for their size and medium but in the sheer quantity of art that Rechmaoui has completed in the last nine months.

“Landscapes,” at Galerie Sfeir-Semler, poses a challenge for anyone who has pegged the artist as a purveyor of specific, spatially construed urban forms.

Gone are the tough maps, such as “Beirut Caoutchouc” (2004-2006) – an interlocking map of the Lebanese capital made from 60 pieces of milled rubber that snap together to cover some 20 square meters of floor space – and “Untitled 22” (The Arab World), from 2005 – an “exploded” map of the Arab League’s 22 member states, spread across the corner of the room, with each country pulled apart from its neighbors to accentuate the region’s vexing divisions.

Gone, too, are the concrete architectural models, such as “Spectre” (2006-2008), a sculptural rendition of Ras Beirut’s Yacoubian Building, where Rechmaoui once lived and revisited as a richly layered emblem of failed modernism.

In their place, the artist has lined one side of the gallery with curious paintings on concrete, corrugated metal and coarse synthetic cloth.

Each is an enlarged, copied or stenciled version of an intricate, highly experiential map of a refugee camp in Lebanon. The cartography of Nahr al-Bared, before it was destroyed, looks like an anatomical study of a torso, with neighborhoods like red blooms in the lungs and a winding blue road for a spine.

The series is based on a collection of 30 drawings, some fluttered with Post-It notes, made by residents of the different camps – children, teenagers, women – during a workshop organized by the Arab Resource Collective, an NGO working on the welfare of underprivileged communities in the Middle East.

The purpose of the workshop was to create a comprehensive, cartographic representation of “virtual” Palestine, as each camp tends to graft the layout of Palestinian towns and cities onto the spatial order of generations-old “temporary” camps.

Six years ago, a friend who had been part of the workshop gave Rechmaoui a folder with the drawings inside as a gift.

“From the beginning, I knew I was going to work on these maps,” he says, “but they slept until now.”

Shortly after he saw the drawings, another friend gave Rechmaoui a CD of digital images of cluster bombs collected in South Lebanon.

“They’re like portraits,” Rechmaoui says. “The de-miners archive them in a way. They put them on a white background and photograph them close up. Outside their office, they have a garden that’s roped off, with the different cluster bombs arranged like objects in a mini-museum.”

Along the other side of the gallery, there are three variations on this theme. One is a big, expressive painting, seemingly half-finished, which appears to show a team of de-miners at work in a landscape with a sketched in truck.

Another is a strange series of eerily seductive portraits – cluster bombs, mortar munitions and a number of other unexploded ordnance – on uniform, aluminum grounds.

The last, which most obviously echoes Rechmaoui’s previous work, features a smattering of bomb-shaped cartouches strewn across the walls – like glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars and planets in a child’s bedroom.

“The clusters are made to fool,” says Rechmaoui. “They’re made to look attractive. All arms are sexy ... they’re almost art objects already.

“They’re effective even before they’re used. People love them and are afraid of them. They are for protection and result in death. That death is also latent. Even if there was a peace treaty signed today between Lebanon and Israel, the clusters could still explode 20 years from now.”

None of this will appease critics who lament that all contemporary art in Lebanon is irritatingly preoccupied by war. It does, however, illuminate the ways in which anyone who was a boy in Beirut in the 1970s or 1980s probably developed a serious weapons fetish.

“War is a sexy subject and it always gets attention,” says Rechmaoui.

“War is always in my work but it’s subtle. We’re not talking about destruction and blood. It’s more about the structure of this society and its language, which makes it ready for war all the time.

“Basically, what I try to do in my work is break these small issues and details off of the whole thing. Maybe I’m trying to understand something, probably to avoid it later. But war is something we have had to deal with since we were kids.”

One last series in the exhibition acts as a hinge between the camp maps and the cluster bombs. Around ten small geometric abstractions are hung along the back wall of the gallery. Each is a square of concrete, mesh, soldered metal and other materials on wood. At once fragile and durable, they pick up where Rechmaoui left off in 1998, when Beirut’s Centre Culturel Français hosted his first solo show.

Rechmaoui was a painter then, who had abandoned the social realist and abstract expressionist styles he’d been messing with as an art school student in Boston. After returning to Beirut in 1993, he began making paintings from the materials of the city’s reconstruction – tar, cement, aluminum and zinc.

After that, Rechmaoui put painting aside, but he never gave up the idea of using urban phenomena as the conceptual starting point and material substance of his work.

The revelations of the Yacoubian Building and the refugee camp are, for him, effectively the same. Each is the site of a rusticated cosmopolitanism that deflates societal pretensions and cuts across class lines.

A year ago, while packing up his old studio in Hamra and moving to a larger, more industrial space in Jisr al-Bacha, Rechmaoui came across the old CCF works for the first time in a decade. He asked a carpenter to make him 100 small wooden panels, and began painting.

“I decided to play again with these materials,” he says.

“The panels were like scratch paper, a notebook. I did them without thinking. I don’t mind going back and forth in styles. It’s like remembering who I was 13 years ago.”

Marwan Rechmaoui’s “Landscapes” is up at Karantina’s Galerie Sfeir-Semler through March 24. For more information, please call 01-566-550 or visit www.sfeir-semler.com