Lynne Tillman Reviews Etel Adnan: Seasons, Now Up at Galerie Lelong

Lynne Tillman reviews Etel Adnan's new show, Etel Adnan: Seasons, which opened at Galerie Lelong & Co. this fall. "Adnan’s imaginative language, her ear, her intense engagement in home and history, and innovative textual play mark her poetics," writes Tillman at 4Columns. "She is a profound and compassionate thinker, who is prized among poets." 

Concision of images and ideas is prominent in Adnan’s literary oeuvre, just as it is in her visual work. Her paintings—landscapes of vivid, horizontal bars of colors; a glowing sun, full and round, perched on a horizon line—might appear unlike her cerebral poems, but her paintings’ stark simplicity is equivalent to her writing’s economy. 

Differences respond to their mediums: words do what a painting can’t, a painting does what words can’t. Adnan has written: “Materials, for artists, are things that mediate thought . . . condition one’s aesthetic choices . . . They become in a way a co-author of one’s work.” The medium, in a wry sense, creates the message, or “mediate[s] thought,” as Adnan puts it. She calls a leporello a “folding book.”

In Adnan’s current exhibition at Galerie Lelong, a leporello stands in a vitrine. Stretched open, its flattened-out page-like divisions allow it to be read like a text. A leporello, unfolded, creates horizontal movement: a viewer starts here, ends there, and time passes. Like a book, the artwork can be reread, or read from the middle to the start or to the finish.

Keep reading at 4Columns. Etel Adnan: Seasons closes on December 23, for those of you in the New York area.