Etel Adnan spent years returning to landscape, especially Mount Tamalpais in California, yet her paintings rarely behave like conventional descriptions of scenery. Colour blocks, simple geometric forms and compressed spaces can reduce a mountain to something almost symbolic.
Adnan once described beginning a painting with one mark, such as a red square, then allowing that first decision to determine what had to happen next. Her work moved between painting, poetry, drawing, tapestry and writing, with colour functioning as something that did not require translation into language.
That last point interests me because Adnan was also a writer.
Someone who spent so much of her life with words found another form precisely where words were unnecessary.
A mountain in a painting does not need to explain itself.
It can become red.
The sky can become green.
Scale can collapse.
Colour can carry the emotional information instead.
Painting then becomes less like describing a place and more like remembering how that place occupied the mind.
https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2024/abstraction/etel-adnan
