On Etel Adnan's Painting

Ever since the dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel 2012, Etel Adnan’s paintings became known to a wider audience. They attracted immediate attention, not least for their sheer beautiful simplicity. In this seeming beauty they stand in contrast to her writing, often drastically describing the violence of the post-colonial situation e. g. in Lebanon. One example is, of course, her experimental novel Sitt Marie Rose, another one her book-long poem “Arab Apocalypse”. Can we read her painting as a form of a post-colonial aesthetic strategy? In the essay I first discuss Adorno’s critique of engagement in art and want to argue that a non-figurative mode of art can potentially be seen as political. Then I secondly turn to Negri’s analysis of abstraction as a form related to the abstraction of capital and ask how this can be related to Adnan’s strategy. Her approach is, thirdly, especially complicated since her paintings always oscillate between abstraction and landscape painting (similar to the approach of Nicolas de Staël). Fourthly, I want to discuss one special element which is often to be found in her painting: The red square which embodies this oscillation between the abstract and the figurative – Is it a red square or the sun? Fifthly, there is a utopian moment to abstraction in Adna’s art since it can be perceived as a momentary release from culture into a heterotopian space. Sixthly, I turn to her famous poem “Arab Apocalypse” in which colors, the hieroglyphic and the sun (again) play a central role. Finally, I weave these threads together in a short conclusion.

Keywords: Ethel Adnan, painting, abstraction