Cornwall Life – October 2019

(^72) ŠCornwall Life: August 2019
H
uguette Caland is an
octogenarian Lebanese artist,
the daughter of the first Lebanese
post-independence president,
who has lead a peripatetic life taking in
such places as Paris and Los Angeles,
before returning home to Beirut.
What is certain from the beginnings of
the exhibition is that Caland is a master
colourist. This fact is clear in the 1964, oil
on linen, painting Cancer/Soleil Rouge,
which was Caland’s first painting. It is a
large abstract work painted in a luscious
cadmium red. Concentric circles pulsate
out from the centre of the painting like
an eye dying behind the immense glare
of the ball of fire in the sky. The painting
reveals within the gazer that feeling of the
fierce intensity of the sun in the Levant. A
luminous summer’s day when you catch
the sun inadvertently, swiftly look away
and close your eyes to its unyielding light.
Then that omnipotent redness, sparks
alight, in the darkness behind your eyelids.
In Untitled (1970) we discover another
leitmotif of Caland’s work: line. Her mature
and confident mark making with oils is like
a master draughtsperson with a Sharpie
pen in hand. No mean feat with something
as viscous and mercurial a medium as
oil paint. Enter another preoccupation of
Caland’s oeuvre: fun. This painting has a
wonderful pop art sensibility about it, as
though Lichtenstein had painted a giant
hair follicle.
Caland’s mark making brought me
great pleasure, because I am a sucker
for drawing; for draughtspersonship, for
line, for shade, for depth, for imprint of
marks, for texture, for life rendered in its
own exclusive medium. Drawing should
be tutored in schools in juxtapostion with
maths and reading and writing. It is the
beginnings of all visual mediums in art and
in design. As worthy a communicator as
any other.
Many of the works on display weaved
a complex narrative between figuration
and abstraction: the twin behemoths of
painting. In Helen (1967, oil on linen),
there was the obvious composition of two
human legs, but its framing abstracted
them, rendering both narratives at once
resolute and redundant. It is a figurative
painting and it is an abstract painting.
Often when we speak of the abstract in
painting we think of such luminaries as
Rothko and Pollock, which were, in fact,
non-representational artists. Caland takes
something concrete and physical and
repositions it, readjusts it and reinterprets
it, thereby abstracting it.
This is once again joyously demonstrated
in the painting Bribes de Corps (Body
Parts) (1973, oil on linen). A large orange
derrière, surrounded by red, has a white
vaginal space at its centre. It is a gloriously 
Kiss (1968)