The Timeless Light of Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan’s art, like her life, was defined by language. She was born in 1925, during the French occupation of Lebanon, and grew up in the polylingual post-Ottoman Levant. Her family spoke Turkish and Greek at home, she overheard Arabic in the streets of Beirut, and French was on the curriculum at her Catholic school. Writing would come to define her life early on, first as a poet of linguistic virtuosity, then as a professor of philosophy at ease deciphering the semantic contortions of phenomenology, and later, as a novelist of unsparing political commentary. 

Language for Adnan, however, did not only mean the written word. ‘There are many languages which are not made for words,’ she observed in a 2017 interview with Beshara Magazine. Dance, music and the visual arts – each was possessed of their own mysterious language, ineffable and ‘meant to be absorbed.’ ‘This Beautiful Light,’ White Cube’s retrospective of the late artist’s dizzying output, is a tightly curated exhibition that transcends and mystifies in equal measure.

Bringing together works on canvas, ceramic, woven tapestries and leporellos – concertina-style artists’ books – the exhibition presents an artist who was deeply engaged with abstraction, colour and materiality. Included are a selection of Adnan’s small oil paintings, among them several Piet Mondrian-like pieces, all untitled and from 2018. Adnan preferred not to title her works, to avoid imposing interpretation upon them. Composed of chunky rectangular and square blocks of solid colour, Adnan’s quadrilateral abstractions were formed using a palette knife instead of a paintbrush, a practice adopted when she first began painting in the mid-1950s. ‘A knife works horizontally,’ she noted in the Beshara interview, ‘and what it does naturally is a rectangle or a square.’ Abstraction for Adnan was the result of a process which she believed channelled a specific energy: her compositional choices were more concerned with capturing this vitality than with any formal stylistic programme of figurative reduction and elision. Speed, too, was necessary for harnessing this vibrancy, and many of her oil paintings were produced in one sitting. 

Adnan communicates without words a radically profound message.

Adnan moved to Northern California in 1958 to teach at Dominican College in Marin County, a coastal community set beneath a jagged tectonic ridge to its west, Mount Tamalpais its highest point. The mountain would be a great influence upon Adnan throughout the rest of her life – in 1986, she published Journey to Mount Tamalpais, a collection of poems and illustrations exploring her connection to the region’s nature – and its archetypal form appears in several untitled works in the show. As with two untitled works from 2014 and 2015, simple pyramidal forms break through their respective horizon lines, summits set against the expanse of solid backgrounds. Reduced to their symbolic form, Adnan’s ‘mountains’ possess a glyphic quality, a reflection of her interest in modes of communication beyond the verbal.

The 1950s and ’60s were a formative period in the development of Adnan’s artistic vocabulary, overlapping with the revolutionary unrest unfolding across the Maghreb, most notably the Algerian War for independence. At the urging of a fellow professor at Dominican College, Adnan began to experiment with painting. Outraged by France’s brutal repression of the Algerian revolution, Adnan, in protest, refused to write in French, focusing all of her creative efforts for a time into painting and tapestry design, among other media. 

‘This Beautiful Light’ includes a selection of tapestries, several designed in the 1960s and fabricated after Adnan died in 2021. Among them, Farandole and Mont Rouge (both 1960s/2022) call to the mind the feverish explosion of colour and pulsating abstract shapes of Wassily Kandinsky’s White Center (1921). Tapestries were yet another form of communication for Adnan, a practice she developed following her encounters with artisans in Tunisia and Egypt. In the process of weaving, the interleaving of warp and weft, one line after the other, Adnan observed an analogy to the spinning of myths and tales. 

Two of Adnan’s leporellos – Signs (2018) and Untitled (2017) – acutely highlight her lifelong exploration of language’s prohibitions and possibilities. In Signs, hand-drawn fictitious symbols and sigils fill every fold of the leporello, the result of which is a book unintelligible to any who read it. Composed in a fictional language, Signs gestures towards the limits of the written word and its intrinsic reliance on a community of fellow speakers. After all, what is a language if only one person understands it? And yet, with Signs, Adnan communicates without words a radically profound message rooted in the very same unintelligibility perceived by all who view it. Where words fail, a deeper, more physical shared experience holds the potential to draw us all together. 

Etel Adnan’s ‘This Beautiful Light’ is at White Cube, New York, until 1 March 

^{Main image: Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017, hardback leporello in a slip sleeve with watercolour on paper, folded: 9 × 29 × 2 cm; unfolded: 29 × 430 × 0.3 cm. Courtesy: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023; photograph: © White Cube (Ollie Hammick)}