Huguette Caland’s body parts

 

Huguette Caland, Lebanese artist, aged 83 years now, has been a pioneer at the beginning of the movements of emancipation of women. She had braved addressing unexpected subjects such as the body, nudity, women's sexuality.

By the early 1970’s, her work consisted of large monochromes representing, with some humor, parts of the human body. The parts are enlarged to the point that they can be confounded with other parts, or even other subjects. The body is perceived as the landscape, the terra incognita, to be explored. Caland’s main concern, in these works, focuses on questioning the relation to the body, the contact between bodies and proximity. Her approach is direct and simple in colour and line. The body is discovered, glorified and celebrated. 

The “Nude” in Caland’s works is an exulted expression of the artist’s relation to her own body. Her works go beyond the simple study of the nude figure in the academic sense. She pushes the expression with limitless boundaries of visual investigation guided by the thirst to grasp this envelope that is ours. 

It is her particular insight and her visual concentration on the exploration of the part as significant, as a field of potential visual experimentation and research, that puts these works at the vanguard of painting of the time. 
The fragment is condensed and transformed into a symbol, a signifier, an evocative pointer to the role the human body plays in its representation in art and society. It is, above all, a claim for freedom, her own, conveyed to the others. 

 In these works, Caland addresses also the Arab women’s condition, in general, and the Lebanese women in particular. She has always been convinced, even at a very early age, that Lebanese women could and should have equal rights in society. She also believed, then, that these women of the 70‘s were as emancipated as women in Europe after 1968.    

Caland’s approach to the body remains personal, humorous, daring and provocative. It grows concurrently from the way she perceives life and her quest for liberty, faces and places, people she has met and spaces she has explored, with a direct and sincere style that has marked her visual production.       

 

Hanibal Srouji
Art Dubai Modern 2014