NEW YORK, NY.- Christine Safa (b. 1994 in Chesnay, France) paints life in motion, rendering sites traversed as a series metaphysical notations felt and collected by the body. The French-Lebanese artist frequently moves across the Mediterranean, between her home and studio outside of Paris and her family’s native city of Beirut. She captures the landscapes she passes through by distilling them into interconnected fragments, melding the intimacy of the land and the body, so that shoulders become mountains, or the horizon blends with her subject’s profile. In Safa’s words:
I see my paintings as tributes, fragments of memories, that which remains. That’s what I paint, what’s left. As I paint, I give birth to the silhouette, the shape of the ruins of memories which both greet and are the victims of time; which for me means my experience of these interior landscapes.
The tactile dimension that connects people and places, recalled with wistful longing, is achieved via her singular painting application and vivid colors. Her vibrant palette of pure pigments blended with oil are applied over a plaster-like mixture of marble dust and rabbit skin glue, simultaneously absorbing the paint’s sheen and bestowing her surfaces with weight and texture. These 15th-century Italian techniques allow the artist to reveal and obfuscate layered images, a process akin to the always flittering dimension of time remembered.
Safa received a master’s from the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, in 2018, where she honed her distinctive painting style. Two years later, she was invited to participate in Horizons at Lévy-Gorvy, an exhibition curated by Etel Adnan, a fellow French-Lebanese artist and poet. The exhibition included the likes of Simone Fattal, Adnan’s life partner, Ugo Rondinone, Joan Mitchell, and Agnes Martin, a cadre of artists who have continuously added to and questioned the record of time.
Following this introduction to her paintings, Safa has continued to pursue these key subjects, already presenting two solo museum exhibitions in Europe. At FRAC Auvergne in 2023, her exhibition De chair et de pierre (Of flesh and stone), brought together a selection of new paintings whose enlarged scale saw swathes of cerulean blues and softened teals congeal into night and seascapes. At ICA Milano in 2022 she presented Ce’ra l’acqua, ed io da sola (There was water, and me alone), her first presentation in Italy, connecting her paintings with her consistent references to Italy’s frescoes.
Last week, Safa won the Jean-François Prat Prize, where her work was presented to a jury by Jean-Marie Gallais, the curator of the Pinault Collection. Her paintings are on display at 53 Quay d’Orsay in France as part of the award. The same week, her first solo show in New York, at Bortolami Gallery, closed.
