Etel Adnan : Planètes - 16 April - 16 May 2020

Etel Adnan’s paintings are often noted for the intimacy of their small scale. Her partner, the sculptor Simone Fattal, has written that they “play the role the old icons used to play for people who believed.” She compares them to talismans that “help in living everyday life,” noting that people usually display them in their bedrooms. [1] Their private character makes them fit for the inner sanctum, safe from the prying eyes of guests. But once there, they aren’t handled like rosary beads; they hang on the wall and are looked at. They’re experienced aesthetically. Any help they provide has its source there. 

Most of Adnan’s paintings take up less than a square foot of space. This is frequently mentioned to distinguish her work from the paradoxical monumentality of Abstract Expressionism, with which it seems to have much in common. Adnan abjures the dimensions of hollowed-out history painting. Her development took its own course on the other side of the country — in California — where she grew like a hothouse plant. Today there’s something untimely about her unhesitating constructions of pure color. Their distance from triumphant mid-century abstraction makes for an element of their appeal. She seems to sweep up its desiderata and shape it anew, usually as landscape. The historical elsewhere that it comes from is fine-grained; it’s the lag of a mere few decades — the decades when abstract painting vacated the vanguard. Painting like this now strikes one as impossible — or worse — charming. Hers is the charm of the “minor” art, which indicates more than diminished scale. Our contemporary thirst for it points to something other than the noble intentions to give a significant artist her due. 

These jewel-like canvases lack the ritual power art had shaken off when it stumbled, stepped, and was pushed out onto the market. If they are talismans, it’s a difference in kind, not degree. Their heightened lyricism raises the occluded moment when art first stood on its own two feet, free to sell itself and determine its course. Indeed, there is an air of magic to that achievement; something appeared for the first time on the stage of history when labor became social value. Art is one repository of that value and therefore also experiences its crisis. Marx’s phrase, the “theological niceties” buoying the commodity, is apropos here. Art can’t step back into its niche on the altar. But there is a haunting continuity within change. Which god but the commodity figured in oil paint stares back from the easel-picture? “For here / there is no place / that does not see you”. [2]

Does grasping the contradiction of these paintings’ talismanic qualities grow more remote when they’re transposed into a virtual exhibition? This remains elusive even when we share their hic et nunc. Adnan’s new works, presented in an online show by Galerie Lelong, make sure to tell you that they’re small in the description. But you have to take their word for it. Can they deliver on their magical promise? There’s the option to “Ask for more information” when viewing each painting. 

This series called “Planets” follows on a group of works from Adnan’s 2016 Serpentine retrospective The Weight of the World and 2017’s “The Weight of the Moon.” What is most significant about Adnan’s latest paintings is that they represent a development in her art. Planète 13 — the last numbered — could be considered a bridge between the earlier and current paintings. In the Weight of the World series, Adnan applied pure color directly from the tube using a palette knife in the mode that has served her faithfully for over half a century. Most of the time, each aliquot stops precisely where another begins. Her clean juxtapositions never countenance cross-contamination. 

Adnan explains the genesis of “Planets”:

The Weight of the World paintings began with a circle drawn by compass. But not just any circle. For these, I had to draw a circle that suggested the density of the world. To achieve this, we trust the magic of art. That means waiting for the moment when all interior being is stretched towards the will to realize this project, this decision. All of the sudden, because you really want it, this circle is no flat ordinary form, but the world itself. This transmutation is what we call a work of art. Proof of this is that nobody objected to the title we chose. It produced a mysterious movement of intention, of the first intention toward the work. We can recognize its success. From the world, we moved toward the planets. This time, the initial circle was followed, at the bottom of the painting, by a drawing that recalled the Earth on which we live: boat, vase, fruit, stairs, etc. As if by magic, with our alert imagination, the nature of the circle changes, it’s no longer the World but a Planet. [3]

Adnan displays an acute awareness of the total reaction we witness within the bounds of each painting, the shift in its force field following the slightest alteration to its parts. 

Planète 13 is like a close-up of any one of the circle portraits from before. The counterweight of the green-gray world above is the bar of yellow lifting the orange expanse — the horizon line, if we read this as a cosmic landscape. Only Planètes 1 and 4 observe the same chromatic purity, opacity, and partition. In these two, along with 5, ashen shrubs intrude. They look like something from Anselm Kiefer: burnt vestiges. They’ve thrown off the equilibrium, and the other elements of the painting must answer and accommodate their presence. The series registers an unfolding experiment. Nothing different happens in 1, while 4 flips the color of a sector liberated by the circle’s expansion to the left and right sides. But 5 draws more drastic consequences: the circle begins nesting color, building it up into a modelled succession of values. It’s now a lumpy maroon sphere receding along the edges. The circle has become a ball — a planet. 

Planètes 9 and 10 represent subtler efforts to come to terms with the impetus toward three-dimensional illusion brought on by the drawn element meant to recall the Earth. The golden Planète 9 glows before its subdued pink background. Spatial relations that don’t occur solely on the surface of the painting and the mere presence of what could be termed a “background” is something new in Adnan’s work. Background tries to get a grip on itself in Planète 6, but with some doubt. The blue there faintly reacts to the orange orb set off by the yellow circle and bike. The implications of this dynamic have not yet been worked through. 

To what extent have the drawings been assimilated with the concrete unity of the painting? Adnan’s previous work attains a high level of organic integration through a sensitive equation of form and color. Planète 10 may offer a foretaste of interactions to come in subsequent paintings, a way toward a resolution or a productive heightening of tension. Here, the ladder is not just a glyphic element like the bicycles, boats, and leaves of the other canvases. Even if it still functions as a sign like these others, its semiotic content — and not only its form — prompts a double reach toward the moon (complete with shining craters) suspended above it. “I want! I want!”

Adnan had pushed the flatness of her paintings beyond the landscape and into the precincts of the decorative. Do these works represent a transcendence of that achievement on its own basis? Has the utmost shallowness given way to depth? Has the self-critical tendency of her work opened onto another realm? Or has something been introduced from the outside? 

Adnan’s picture plane has opened to accommodate solidity. These are essential scenes of figure and ground, resulting in a novel dramatic interest. Adnan has begun to worry the surface; she abolishes the impenetrability of her color. She is dealing with fresh problems that she has created for herself. This is one definition of freedom. It follows from the consequences of her technique, of concrete accomplishments which afford no complacency. “I realized how much materials, for artists, are things that mediate thought, how much they condition one’s aesthetic choices, how much they become the elements of one’s expression, and instead of being just a support, they become in a way a co-author of one’s work.” [4] 

What does this change indicate? Has Adnan forsaken the structural rigor of her color alchemy’s surface? Planète 13 is the only work that holds this ground. If that’s not the case, she faces a new task. And it will be pursued immanently, within the slight remit of her phantasmagoric talismans. //

[1] Simone Fattal, “Painting as Pure Energy.” Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World. edited by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Koenig Books, 2016, pp. 26-56.

[2] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Modern Library, 1995. 

[3] Etel Adnan, “#TheArtistSpeak: Etel Adnan” Galerie Lelong Press Release. April 2020, translated by Austin Carder.

[4] Etel Adnan, “The Unfolding of an Artist’s Book.” Discourse, vol. 20, no. 1/2, 1998, p 12.