Sophie Whettnall - Etel Adnan. La banquise, la forêt et les étoiles

Sophie Whettnall (1973) works with video, photo, installations and performance. She won the Prix de la Jeune Peinture in 1999 and enjoys international recognition.
Since the nineties, the work of Sophie Whettnall offers a reflection on the forces that define our relationship to the world around us, by materialising and documenting them. Sophie Whettnall focuses on light and analyses its presence and zones of absence and passage. The aesthetic pieces of the artist prove simultaneously sensitive and powerful, resting on a dialectic tension and attempt to instigate a relation between contradicting concepts and perceptions: between softness and sensuousness, yin and yang, women and men…
Her work also contributes to a form of autobiographical project.

As is customary for exhibitions by Brussels artists held at CENTRALE, Sophie Whettnall was asked to choose an international artist to exhibit alongside her. She selected the canvasses, drawings, watercolours and engravings of Etel Adnan. At the crossroads of East and West, the work of Etel Adnan, born in Beirut in 1925, is imbued with the richness of warm lands, the burning sun and rugged mountains and is adorned with a literary aspect re-transcribed in paint, since the painter is also a writer and has also worked with directors for the theatre.

The exhibition’s subtitle, La banquise, la forêt et les étoiles (The ice field, the forest and the stars), reflects the universe of the Belgian artist as well as that of Adnan. A formal dialogue is established between both artists, a shared, intimate and personal vision of the landscape, the light and its transparency.