“Free” is a somewhat weak adjective to describe the trajectory and work of the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland (1931-2019). Daughter of Béchara el-Khoury, she was 12 years old when he became the first president of Lebanon which became independent in 1943. Instead of the comfortable life that this situation seemed to promise her, she preferred a more turbulent one, married a Frenchman, Paul Caland, and don’t refuse adventures. Above all, she drew and painted, took courses at the American University of Beirut and came to live in Paris from 1970. She remained there until 1987 and her move to California, to Venice. It is to this Parisian period that the exhibition is dedicated, drawings and paintings little or not seen until now.
The paintings are mostly from the series Body scrapswhich lasted throughout the 1970s. They attract the eye from afar by the naked simplicity of their composition in a few curves and two or three colors, no more. They appear at first abstract, close to those of the Americans of the color field paintingMorris Louis or Kenneth Noland. But it quickly turns out that these curves are those of parts of the female body seen very closely: mouth, vulva, hips. Stylized to the extreme, sometimes magnified by pinks or intense yellows, sometimes barely enhanced with a few pale tones, they remain easily identifiable. They are even in the works where Caland abbreviates and aggregates the anatomical volumes to the point of suggesting unknown plants or landscapes of dunes and rocks. In the latter case, white dominates, light and bright.
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