Simone Fattal: Paintings and Ceramics

The Mount Sannine (1979) is the last work she accomplishes; it completes an assiduous observation of the mountain, which she had been looking at every day through her studio windows in Beirut. Partially covered with snow, the imposing, powerful nearby mountain gradually became a theme in the artist's work with its outlines, luminous shades, colors and the impact it has.

In the beginning the paintings are brightly and intensely colored, then throughout the years, slowly become more and more bright. White fills and invades the compositions of the last paintings, like the light of Beirut: a white, dazzling, almost blinding light, which is both troubling and reassuring. At the end, the Mount Sannine visually almost disappears on the paintings and becomes a reminiscence, opening a space of conversation between figuration and abstraction where their boundaries are sublty blurred.

These paintings of the 1970s are like a reflection on daily life and memory. Both are essential in the work of Simone Fattal whose foundations engage a tenuous relationship between the past (History) and the present. The artist is fascinated by archeology : digging the earth and revealing objects, damaged fragments and traces of past civilizations.

When she moved to California in the early 1980s, she started to focus on ceramics and sculpture making. Her hands in the earth, she gives shape, without any form of mannerism, to standing bodies and resistant architectures. In parallel to these already well-known sculptures, she also creates objects for the domestic space, for the everyday life : vases, pots, teapots, dishes or cups. The voluntarily primary gestures and traces visible on the sculptures are more refined on the domestic objects. Simone Fattal worships craftsmanship whose teachings are transmitted through time, cultures and geographies. She admires meticulous gestures, precise techniques, know-how and material working.

The exhibition combines these paintings and terracotta pots, and it feels like an encounter of the present and archeology, art and craftsmanship, the existent and the memory of this existence, which come into collision in Fattal's work.

Conscious of a detereorating world, of a history and a present nourished by endless brutality, Simone Fattal experiences the fragility, the resistance and the survival of our stories through the material.

- Julie Crenn