Maria Howard reviews Etal Adnan: The Weight of the World at the Serpentine Gallery, London, on view through September 11, 2016.

Howard writes: “[Adnan’s] paintings evoke sheer joy, their style unpretentious, not naive but innocent, at odds with her poetry and writings that bear witness to the violence of the world. They may seem like simple compositions at first … but these are not just a colorist’s paintings, they are visual poems, each color chosen as carefully as a word in a love letter to nature.”