Handwriting and drawing intertwined, responding to each other and exhibiting themselves.
From this weekend, and until February 13, the Center Pompidou-Metz is exhibiting a collection of leporellos by the Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan, these accordion-books which unfold and can reach nearly 10 meters in length. .
In the galleries of the
Writing is Drawing
exhibition
,
they are surrounded
by the heterogeneous works of 48 other creators, anonymous calligraphers from a Carolingian manuscript with drawings by Nancy Spero and Louise Bourgeois.
An accumulation that carries a central idea: the perfect interweaving of writing and drawing.
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"Etel's dream was for writing, which is in the domain of the intimate, to become monumental
" and
"for a museum to show this relationship between writing and drawing which is very strong in her"
, explains Jean. -Marie Gallais, curator of the exhibition. For her leporellos, at the center of the exhibition route, Etel Adnan copied poems from contemporary Iraqi authors, notably Abd el-Wahhab al-Bayyati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, with whom she was friends. In the eyes of the poet, it was a question of
"drawing Arabic"
rather than writing it, and of creating
"a river of poetry"
with this
"plastic"
alphabet.
that she has never fully mastered.
Born of a Syrian father and a Greek mother, Arabic has remained a language that she heard as a child, during her youth spent in Lebanon under French mandate.
After studying in Paris in the 1950s, she developed a passion for English and moved to the United States.
From papyrus to drawing
The Metz exhibition intends to reconnect through drawing with this dialogue of cultures, languages and continents. Ancient manuscripts rarely exhibited correspond to his works, such as a vividly colored papyrus from Ancient Egypt representing an extract from the
Book of the Dead
, on loan from the National Library of France (BNF). Other exceptional loans: illuminated books from the 14th and 15th centuries, from the Metz library, and a Merovingian manuscript from the 8th century, also loaned by the BNF.
"It was essential to look for much older things that show that this interweaving of writing and drawing has existed since the existence of writing, or even before"
, underlined Jean-Marie Gallais in front of a clay tablet of cuneiform writing dating from 1750 before our era, while rejoicing in the “
enthusiasm
” of the partner institutions.
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Etel Adnan also wanted to highlight the physical relationship to handwriting. Two original letters from Vincent Van Gogh and a drawing by Rimbaud from one of his school notebooks are available to the public. Exhibited alongside them, a drawing by Marguerite Yourcenar, a manuscript by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and another by Victor Hugo, so that the visitor
"can imagine the journey of (their) hands"
. Another wish of the artist, that these manuscripts
"be looked at with the same intensity" as
a painting or a sculpture, specifies Jean-Marie Gallais.
The exhibition will last only three months because of the
"fragility"
and
"exceptional character of the works presented"
, most of which are not
"replaceable by equivalents"
, according to the curator of the exhibition.
At the same time, the Center Pompidou-Metz is exhibiting 22 artists from the 12th Taipei Biennale which took place in 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis.
This exhibition designed by Bruno Latour, Martin Guinard and Eva Lin is held from November 6 to April 4, 2022.