In 1979, during his years in Beirut, Helmi El-Touni created a rare series of works inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, reimagined not as a childlike tale but as an adult allegory. Drawing on theater, folklore, and symbolic figuration, the artist transforms the familiar narrative into a psychological drama in which innocence, desire, danger, and power coexist. The wolf appears as a cultivated, almost courtly presence—dressed, composed, and seductive—while the female figure oscillates between vulnerability and agency. Through flattened space, bold color, and folk-inflected forms, El-Touni suggests erotic tension without explicitness, using myth as a vehicle to explore intimacy, pursuit, and ambiguity. Created against the backdrop of Beirut’s charged atmosphere in the late 1970s, the series marks an early and daring moment in El-Touni’s practice, where storytelling becomes a means of emotional, cultural, and symbolic inquiry.