Christine Safa
Christine Safa is a French-Lebanese artist graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Born in 1994, she currently lives and works in Paris. Safa is represented by the Galerie Lelong & Co, with locations in Paris and New York. In 2023, the esteemed gallery showcased her solo exhibition titled La forme rêvée d’une forme vue featuring a body of recent and unreleased oil paintings and works on paper in both of its Parisian spaces. That same year, Safa's work La mer, par delà ton épaule was featured in the group show L’île intérieure at the Villa Carmignac in Porquerolles, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais. Until the beginning of March 2024, she presents a solo exhibition titled De chair et de pierre at the FRAC Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand.
During her preparatory school years and her first two years at the Beaux-Arts, Christine Safa attempted to produce highly politicized works, influenced by advice from her professors and peers encouraging her to develop a "storytelling" around her Lebanese origins, conflicts in the Middle East, traumas experienced by her family, her dual identity... At that time, she created numerous portraits of child soldiers and war landscapes, painted on newspapers brought from Lebanon, adopting an almost journalistic approach to painting.
Christine Safa in her studio. Photo Courtesy: Matteo Verzini, Neptune Papers.
Christine Safa, L’impression du soleil – toutes les pierres sont chaudes, 2020. Oil on canvas,162 x 130 cm. Photo Courtesy: Lévy Gorvy.
It is in 2018, when she began creating self-portraits, that she adopted a more personal approach to painting, seeking to narrate the Lebanon she really knows. She started focusing on her actual memories of her homeland and painted portraits of herself immersed in contemplation, reflecting the palette of warm colors and the search for light that have always animated her work.
Today, Christine Safa focuses her pictorial research on the boundaries - visible and invisible - between shapes and colours, figures and landscapes. The exploration of colour and light remains at the heart of her artistic practice. Through soft waves, coloured skies, silent and solitary figures, the artist gives life to a meditative and evanescent imagery that conveys feelings of nostalgia and melancholy.
Christine Safa, Montagne triangle (Paxos) I, 2022. Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm. Photo Courtesy: Frac Auvergne.
Safa’s practice reveals her attachment to the Mediterranean - particularly her homeland of Lebanon, where she has spent every summer since she was a child - and invites viewers to immerse themselves in the realm of her memories. The warm palette she uses, mainly orange and blue hues, and the mysterious shapes that fill her compositions are also inspired by the artist’s stays in Italy, Spain, and Greece. Sometimes, the marriage of forms reveals a mountain, perhaps a volcano, the branches of a cypress tree, a shoulder, or the profile of her lover Nathan…
Christine Safa, Visage aimé (Venise), 2023. Oil on canvas, 22 x 16 cm. Photo Courtesy: Galerie Lelong & Co.
As the 15th-century Italian primitives did, the artist works with pure pigments that are ground and then mixed with oil to achieve this quality of fleeting and ephemeral images.
The highly absorbent marble powder enables her to impart a more matte appearance to her canvases —particularly echoing her fascination with Mediterranean frescoes, such as Fra Angelico's Annunciation preserved at the San Marco convent in Florence. Her paintings also resonate with her extensive readings, including Albert Camus's depictions of bodies immersed in water, oily skins, and warm colors in Les Noces, love poems by Paul Éluard or Khalil Gibran, François Cheng’s writings…
Sometimes, as seen in her painting Visage aimé (Venise), Christine Safa first incises a drawing, a "preparatory" motif, using the back of her brush. This technique lends relief to the figurative part of the work, allowing her to explore the colours in an abstract manner later on. Her watercolours on paper show a more modern, impressionistic influence reminiscent of the works of Paul Cézanne and of the Nabis master Pierre Bonnard.
Christine Safa, Étude d’oliviers à Paxos III,, 2022. Watercolor on paper, 30,5 x 30,5 cm. Photo Courtesy: Galerie Lelong & Co.
Safa also cites Lebanese painter, poet, and philosopher Etel Adnan, who passed away in autumn 2021, as a major influence. In 2021, Adnan presented the exhibition Horizon at the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in Paris, featuring works by Christine Safa – as well as pieces by artists such as Joan Mitchell and Ugo Rondinone. Adnan’s book Fils du temps, published by the Galerie Lelong & Co in 2021, brings together a series of poems about melancholy, the observation of night and of the sea and her travels across different territories. Many of them resonate with Safa’s paintings:
“the invisible has no owner.
the dream never has walls,
and it’s never cold there
and my shadows stretch
over my body as it sleeps,
and the sky stops being blue, and
the light waits.”
(from “October 27, 2003”)
It was her discovery of Etel Adnan's writings, while in her second year at the Beaux-Arts, that enabled Christine Safa to refocus on painting to describe her true vision and experience of Lebanon, and to move away from the geopolitical approach her teachers had urged her to adopt at the start of her studies. Thanks to the influence of Etel Adnan's work, Safa realized that she could pay tribute to her country in a completely different manner than the one initially advised to her.
Christine Safa, Le lac de deux visages, 2021. Oil on canvas, 195 x 171 cm. Photo Courtesy: Praz-Delavallade.
Christine Safa paints from her memories, predominantly those from Lebanon, unveiling childhood reminiscences of Beirut. She strives to represent unique elements of the landscape and atmosphere encountered during her travels, focusing on the singular light and air enveloping faces and bodies, either reflected or engulfed by the Mediterranean Sea. She explains “I see my paintings as tributes, fragments of memories: that which remains. And that which remains is what I paint. As I paint, I generate the outline, the shape of ruins of memories that both welcome time and are subject to it. For me, this is ultimately my experience of these inner landscapes. On the canvas, the figures settle down, fade away, and become a layer of paint. The colour becomes saturated or lets the light shine through. A discernment of emotional states, dictated by the search for a familiar light”.
Her art also engages with the experience of exile and thoughts for those who remained in Lebanon during the 1975 civil war. However, Safa’s practice is a reflection of personal recollections rather than a political commentary: she depicts the Lebanon she loves and, most importantly, knows.
Christine Safa, La mer, par-delà ton épaule IV, 2023. Oil on canvas, 152 x 130 cm. Photo Courtesy: Galerie Lelong & Co.
Safa's works emanate a sense of tranquility, touching our deepest memories —moments of contemplation by the sea, in the forest, or in the mountains. Deciphering her works requires time, allowing one's imagination to navigate silhouettes merging into landscapes, that might also be waves or rocks. Through vibrant colors, Christine Safa immortalizes the poetical essence of the Mediterranean, sharing a timeless ode to her homeland.
Selected Exhibitions:
2021: L’habitude du ciel, Praz Delavallade, Paris (solo exhibition)
2022: Il y avait de l’eau, et moi seul, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milano (solo exhibition)
2023: La forme rêvée d'une forme vue, Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris (solo exhibition)
2023: Some Landscapes, Bortolami Gallery, New York (group exhibition)
2023: De chair et de pierre, Frac Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (solo exhibition)
Selected awards:
2016: Laureate of the Prix Aurige Finance 2016, Prix des Amis des Beaux Arts, Paris
To learn more about Christine Safa’s work, connect via her Instagram.
Clara Eugène,
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED
