02 December 2005

BEIRUT: In Helen Khal's seminal study "The Woman Artist in Lebanon," written in 1975 and published in 1987 by the Lebanese University of Beirut Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World, Nadia Saikali comes across as an avatar of a boundary-busting avant-garde. While the rest of the women profiled in Khal's book were plying paint on canvas, Saikali, as early as 1969, was teaching herself how to build electric motors that would feed colored lights to the tips of fiber-optic cables.

If Saikali was ahead of her time then, there is still something aggressively out there about her work today. Inching up on her 69th birthday, Saikali has over 20 new canvases on view at Aida Cherfan Fine Art in Downtown Beirut, all of them produced between 2002 and 2005. Yes, she's given kinetic art a rest and returned to painting. But her emphasis of movement and energy is still the same.

"Geodesie-Geodermie" is Saikali's second exhibition with Aida Cherfan and, as the title would suggest, the paintings concern relations with the earth. According to Cherfan, Saikali was tremendously affected by the tsunami that slammed Southeast Asia a year ago this month and endeavored to paint its force. Two of the most abstract works in the show - "A Flot (Afloat)" and "Au Fil de l'Eau (With the Current)" - mark Saikali's attempts to represent, and perhaps tame, those wild seas. What's interesting is that these works are also composed of a skewed grid, with geometric strips cut into the paint with a knife, like a tight, angular mesh that both contains energy and threatens to burst apart.

Perhaps the strongest works in the show are "Ferveur" and "Memoir de l'Eau," which are also the largest and most expensive at 195 by 130 centimeters ($8,880) and 100 by 100 centimeters ($5,550), respectively. Both feature broad brushstrokes dragged horizontally across the canvas, not so much covering the underpainting below as accumulating texture and gesture onto the surface. The stylistic precedent here is, of course, Gerhard Richter. And if Saikali's oil paintings are to be as revolutionary as her fiber optics, there's no better influence than Richter to build on.

Nadia Saikali's "Geodesie-Geodermie" is on view at Aida Cherfan Fine Art in Downtown Beirut through December 2. For more information, call +961 1 983 111.