The Etel Adnan show at KINDL made me feel melancholic. It was the first time I saw her work for real and I was surprised how it affected me. Her work seems so joyous, so full of sun and earth, with happy colours. Why did I feel sad?
Adnan's paintings are like poetry. She literally also painted them horizontally, lying on the table, mostly in a small format as if on a page. Like words, she puts one colour next to the other, without mixing them. And like poetry, the paintings touch upon something that transcends.
I noticed now that most of her paintings go untitled, maybe because the language is already there in the paint, applied thickly on the canvas. Some paintings do have a title, like a series called Le poids du monde (The Weight of the Earth). There was also a tapestry Soleil de feu (Sun of Fire) . Yes, the sun is not the one of a holiday, it is burning, and the earth has weight.
A film showed an interview with Etel Adnan. She talks about Beirut as a city constructed and deconstructed by wars, about humanity having left the earth, about the moon, the universe. There is a quote from her that says that when she will have died, the universe will have lost a friend.
I don't think so. I think that friend is still very much there.