PortraitIf the art world is in favor of 96-year-old Etel Adnan, his paintings and drawings have long been ignored. Born in Beirut, the painter and poet creates a dialogue between letters, manuscripts and graphic works in the exhibition “To write is to draw” at the Center Pompidou-Metz.
A sad hall, concrete and tiled, a second floor, and we arrive at the apartment. Through the window, you can see the bay of Erquy (Côtes-d’Armor) and its perfect roundness. Here takes refuge Etel Adnan, in the secrecy of northern Brittany, when she is tired of Paris. She is 96 years old, but seems to have lived through a thousand. Born in Lebanon, the poet and painter has lived in Beirut, Paris, Los Angeles… However, she never tires of the whims of the tides, the changing light, the graceful flight of the plovers that she observes from her terrace.
A woman facing the ocean. “People come from all over the world to meet this lady”, the taxi driver who commutes to Saint-Brieuc station is surprised. “Today the world comes to her as she went to him, confirms curator Mouna Mekouar, one of her most fervent admirers. Etel is like a sun, from which a lot of light emanates, and she also receives a lot, for she has the wisdom to know how to listen. ” A line from the poet inspired her to exhibit “Luogo e segni” (“places and signs”), at the Pointe de la Douane in Venice, in 2019, around “Of the clear and the dark, of the light and its splinters, of the wind and of the sea”.
At the Center Pompidou-Metz, Etel Adnan’s dream comes true: to exhibit language and writing “like a painting in a museum”.
More than pilgrims, it is his loving family who come to pay homage to Erquy. Poets, dealers, curators, artists, of course: in September alone, Emma Lavigne, new general manager of the Pinault collection (and former president of the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris) made the trip, as did Chiara Parisi. The latter, at the head of the Center Pompidou-Metz, orchestrates there, with curator Jean-Marie Gallais, the exhibition “To write is to draw”, around Etel Adnan’s dream: to expose the language and the writing, manuscripts and notebooks “Like a painting in a museum”.
From Merovingian manuscripts to “litanies” by Louise Bourgeois, from drawings by Victor Hugo to drafts by Roland Barthes, the Metz museum is making itself, this fall, a real empire of signs with the work of Adnan as a reference. His poems use simple, effective sentences. Nothing is ever convoluted. Like his paintings, full of bright colors. Often landscapes, a mountain in the shape of a triangle, a round star, a flowing river. She allows herself abstraction with squares, circles, lines, always simple.
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