Book 4 of “Leaves of Grass” by the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman is titled, “Children of Adam” and incorporates a number of the most good, blazing strains of poetry ever written within the English language. “Was it doubted that those that corrupt their our bodies conceal themselves?” Whitman poeticized in his nonpareil canto, “I Sing the Body Electric,” just like the bearded sage he was underneath his wide-brimmed hat, inking the literary ecology of the thoughts when the United States was riven by the dual evils of conflict and slavery.
Through that darkness which in some ways nevertheless casts its lengthy, chilly shadow, Whitman wrote verse empowered by the triumph of democracy as a liberation of the physique. Adam, a metaphor for all of humankind as sure by kindred blood and monolithic ancestry, is simply getting up because the earliest rays of solar peek over the legendary horizon of Eden. The ultimate canto of guide 4 in “Leaves of Grass” gleams with passages of the first-person narrative that approximate prose of their easy directness. Whitman’s voice is like Adam, audible, approaching.
He implores, “Touch me, contact the palm of your hand to my physique as I go, / Be not afraid of my physique.” These evocations are rapturous embraces of body-positive, early trendy humanism, trustworthy to the ideas of naturalness nearly as good when the world across the poet and his individuals, which included everyone, have been struck with violent phrases and acts of separation, of disembodiment. But the basic poem, epic and sprawling, the results of a lifetime of meditation and craft, is gently urgent its final level, that like a contact, by a hand, conveys the sensation of bodily abstraction.
It is a sensation executed by the purity of visible expertise, but no much less visceral, within the work of Berke Doğanoğlu. For the final 5 years, he has begun a promising oeuvre, culminating in 16 work that mirror the curious phenomena of that recognized when the sight turns into felt, and dropping its type to the attention assumes novel qualities underneath a hand. With shut, intimate perspective, Doğanoğlu frames elements of the physique, mixing figurative and impressionistic strategies, in the direction of a illustration of the physique as a palpable abstraction.
The picture at his fingertips
There is a rainbow on the door and a younger man is slowly, lazily waking up. A passerby stops at his window, fingering his prayer beads, glancing in earlier than shifting on. A pink bus rushes by means of the site visitors outdoors underneath waving magnolias alongside the traditional inlet by the shorefront. It is hushed indoors, and heavenly cloud-hued, like the inside of a dream. Sparsely curated, The Pill is presenting Doğanoğlu’s work within the span of two exhibitions, in order to emphasise the area inside the area, not solely of the white dice gallery however of the painter’s aesthetic strategy.
The shoulder is a spherical place, and by no means resolves to a degree. By the neck its delicate zones are run by means of with a form of vulnerability that triggers softness, give and belief. Under the cleft of its pit is a forbidden territory whereby the scent of the person is saved and emits involuntary reactions of attraction and repulsion. Entering the cool, clean ether of The Pill for “As Adam, Early within the Morning,” a pair of work dangle from a wall, alone collectively. One photos these merging elements of the physique the place the shoulder and again turn into the neck, hair and face.
Not fairly a profile, because the aspect of the face is left to a grayish monochrome background the place the attention socket dips, earlier than revealing the home windows to the nameless soul. What follows is extra of an enigma, because the individual is about-face, their again to the portraitist. In each works, Doğanoğlu darkens patches of pores and skin towards the higher neck. The coloration scheme is pale, seen strokes of sunshine purple commingle with beige and yellow earlier than a neat head of bluish-black hair. It is a conventional craft with a up to date twist for its evasion of facial identification, eyeless and decentered.
And coming to the second of three partitions on which Doğanoğlu’s work dangle at The Pill is a female determine, adorned in what may look like swimwear. In a intelligent technical play of type, Doğanoğlu demonstrates his talent for that surrealistic strategy to creative precision, notably present in portray, when the figurative is concretely in its imagery, but is topic to interpretation, one thing akin to op-art, to the extent the place a number of visions of the identical work are equally seen. Whether painted from the again or entrance turns into much less essential than the essence of their flesh.
Named, nonexistent
With the spectrum of an aurora borealis, Doğanoğlu units off into full abstraction in a portray curated close to the center of the semicircular association of canvases. A gradual decrescendo of sunshine purples blends like fog right into a wash of heat blues and darkish greens which might be without delay translucent and opaque. The impact is that of setting the time to predawn, when the sky is ripe for modifications that seem supernatural, as from the visions of a dreamer on the verge of waking. And out of that haze of atmospheric blur, morning rests on the pores and skin of the sleeper.
An individual and into the work of Doğanoğlu might discover a parallel narrative at play between that portrayed, and the seer behind the scenes, what may be known as the artist’s gaze. Opposite the wall from the devoted pair of work, a selected trio of works is conceivably the snapshots of an onlooker, a fellow sleeper whose still-tired eyes open to the sight of a physique so intimate that at first, its elements blur into sketches of coloration and type, not in contrast to tough strokes of paint. Doğanoğlu’s work recommend that sensual notion is confined to subjective interpretation.
In a 2019 essay for The Paris Review, authors James Schuyler, Helen Frankenthaler and Douglas Dreishpoon mentioned the mutual relationship between paintings and poetry. “Paintings, like poems, thrive on subjective associations,” they wrote, in reference to a midcentury, worldwide correspondence between practitioners of those kindred inventive disciplines. Their widespread sources of inspiration and appreciation arguably derive from an experiential skepticism relating to the character of objectivity, of materiality as an absolute.
Nearly two centuries aside because the first version of “Leaves of Grass” went to press in 1855, Istanbul-based Doğanoğlu, born in 1990, has tailored the ekphrastic strains of Whitman right into a collection of work that, by means of sight, immediate a number of meanings out of what it means to really feel, each as a metaphor for emotional response and as a synonym for the sense of contact. Doğanoğlu asks seers passing by means of The Pill, how may a sense be seen? In line with such gallery artists as Leyla Gediz and Mireille Blanc, his first solo show is a welcome reply to considered one of paintings’s perennial questions.
