Lebanon - Art Galleries - Etel Adnan & Rita Nakhel

[Nishee]

Lebanese trees and bridging culture gap
Featured in the galleries this week, the canvasses of Etel Adnan and
Rita Nakhel

Helen Khal
Special to The Daily Star

Etel Adnan’s inks and watercolors, currently showing at Galerie Janine
Rubeiz, are sketched portraits of bridges ­ specifically of the rising
metal suspensions of New York and the low stone arches of Paris.
The series began 10 years ago, when Adnan looked down at New York from
the 34th floor of a mid-town skyscraper and saw from the window “exactly
nine bridges.” She remembers it as an “indescribable sight, epic and
mythical” ­ a small island of thrusting vertical power linked to a vast,
sprawling continent by embracing arms of steel.
The bridges of Paris project an entirely different image: “They’re built
of stone,” Adnan says, “golden, ancient and astonishingly evocative of
the stones of the south Mediterranean ... From one river bank to the
other, they carry the history of France ... Anchoring their feet in the
water, they’re earthbound and smaller than American bridges, but
bestowed with the grandeur of an historic past.”
Along with wanting to convey differences in character, Adnan is also
motivated by the bridge structure itself as a visual symbol of human
exchange and mingling. In each drawing or watercolor, she places
emphasis on its sweeping horizontal stretch across water as a symbolic
conduit of communication between separate peoples.
Adnan, who is a poet as well as a painter, pursues both arts with equal
passion and attainment. She has had 26 solo exhibitions in the U.S.,
Europe and the Middle East since 1961. In the early 1960, she began
producing what she calls “painted manuscripts,” a combination of poetry
and images “written” in the pages of long, folded Japanese books. She
sees it as a way to present “the interaction of two sensibilities: That
of the poet and that of the painter who paints a poem.”
Her bridge series is a collection of visual poems, marked by an economy
of expression somewhat similar to that of the Japanese haiku. Working
swiftly, she intuitively captures the expansive spirit of the bridge and
its urban surroundings. In a shorthand of quick strokes, applied with
the freshness and whimsy of a child, she outlines the arched stones or
suspension cables, the skyscrapers or smokestacks, the river barges
below, the sun or moon above.
The two large wall hangings included in the exhibition introduce Adnan’s
talent in tapestry design. Abstract in genre, they center on a lively
counterpoint of chromatic contrasts that, in style, is closely related
to her work in oils. The one entitled “Jazz” is a dazzling syncopation
of luscious color, finely woven by the Aubusson Ateliers in France. The
other, “Summer in California,” more subdued in hue, and rough in
texture, was loomed in San Francisco by artist-weaver Hal Painter. Both
pieces are splendid examples of modern tapestry, striking in design and
impeccable in execution.
***
Rita Nakhel, at Agial Gallery, is a young artist who says she’s
interested in pursuing the long tradition of landscape painting in
Lebanese art. Her subject is trees. How she paints them, however, has
less to do with the trees of Lebanon than with a landscape of the mind.
Working in oils, she fills her large canvases with heavy, descending
swirls of bright green set against a backdrop of fiery red. Instead of
evoking the airy character of Lebanon’s trees, the shapes suggest the
lush weighted leaves of an exotic jungle plant. It leads one to wonder
whether Nakhel ever lived in Africa, South America or the West Indies.
She said no. If not in this life, then surely in some previous
incarnation. How else to explain this visual storehouse of flambouyant
vegetation?
Nakhel is a daring expressionist who wields her brush with confident,
selective control. She paints the voluptuous fronds of her imagined
trees with such audacity that they burst out of the canvas with
startling force, asserting their presence, clawing for attention. The
energy is impressive, if too conventionally romantic in thematic
motivation. There are truths more enduring that Nakhel has yet to
understand and discover in the turbulent landscape of her mind. Her
aggressive brush and brash colors, which act as the authentic signature
of her psyche, tell us so.
This is Nakhel’s first solo show. She completed her studies at the
National Institute of Fine Arts and in 1997 won the top prize for young
painters at the Latakia Biennial. With Agial behind her, there’s nothing
to hold her back except herself.

Adnan at Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Raouche, until April 27. Tel: (01)
805061.
Nakhel at Agial Gallery, Rue Abdel-Aziz, until April 24. Tel: (01)
345213.