Yolande Naufal (1949-2023)
“The feelings of color are reshaped through my psyche, felt, and experienced from within myself. I must look within myself and not around me. I do not mean representing myself. But, I affirm that I am my subject”.
– Yolande Naufal
Yolande Naufal [June 4, 1949 – January 24, 2023] was a Lebanese artist who lived her entire life in Gemmayze, Beirut.
Her work is associated with naive art and has been regularly exhibited in Lebanon and abroad as solo and group exhibitions. Her work was part of various collections in Lebanon, France, Austria, Sweden, the UK, Denmark, Australia, South Korea, and the USA. Her artwork was featured in several art books in Lebanon and the virtual museum of Lebanese contemporary art.
In her creations, Yolande Naufal plays with her imagination and takes us into the labyrinth of her multifaceted works. Her paintings are the outcome of happy nostalgia for childhood and a beautiful, lively dream.
Naufal has a Ph.D. in psychology, is also the author and illustrator of several books for children, and is the co-founder of the Lebanese Association for Art Education.
The Lost Paradis
The painting represents pure freedom that allows a journey of the spirit, an eternity of seeing and renewal. Through painting, the creative sense emerges. There is the spiritual center of creation. Color is beyond color. Light is beyond light. Forms are beyond forms. It is through two essential elements which
are the pictorial language and the colors that I enter into the visible and the invisible to revisit my country Lebanon, and recreate it in a magical universe. The creation touches on the “fabulous” through the humanization of the elements. My painting is the expression of my thoughts. It carries a message, an idea, a feeling. It is the revelation of mythical enchantment, the humanization of landscapes. I immerse man in nature, and I put nature in the man.
Light and colors inspire me. The sky is a multicolored tent, the mountains are theater sets, I combine the sea and the mountain which is always majestic, out of the ordinary, and, carries within it, the power of the “completely other”. I no longer know who I am dealing with, if it is a sailboat or a blue, red, pink dove, if it is a palm tree or a candle, or a slightly crazy little girl.
My painting presents itself with its natural intensity especially when it comes to the three fundamental colors black, white, and red. Primary colors reinforced by the frequent use of a black background. As with children, the depth planes are placed vertically, their height depending on their distance. My painting demonstrates some characteristics of my style which is described as naive: reversal and flattening of perspective. At first glance, the composition seems clumsy, but the illusion produced underlines the dialogue between land, sea and sky. The distortion of proportions, the juxtapositions of colors live frank without nuances or gradation, schematically represent shapes. At the bottom of the canvas, one of the mountains is painted in red, yellow, green, blue, etc. The sailboats are represented schematically, their curved sails filled with wind create the impression of movement. The trunks of the trees in the foreground are of enormous size producing a dizzying view of the mountains in the distance. The figurative motifs represent the landscapes of my Lebanon. These solid patterns have multiple combinations: flowers, butterflies, fairy birds, places, etc. with a hanging garden going around a mountain, the animation of this place would be provided by a fairy village, a fairy house, fairy objects all together. In the moonlight of the jagged peaks of the mountains coming from who knows where, testifies the capacity to transmit the joy that this place inspires in us.
This country is a lost paradise.
Yolande Naufal – 2015
