The towers are empty, and so is the previous ammunition manufacturing unit. But its Byzantine aesthetic, with skinny rectangular maroon slabs mounted alongside sandy arches, is refreshed with an aerated grandeur. Between pale imperial glory and glimmering residential envy, it seems there’s at all times area for brand spanking new artwork by the Sea of Marmara, even alongside its sparser coastlines. As the mud settles about Fişekhane, a restoration mission befitting a time-traveling film set, the gallery ArtOn lent its vibrant roster of artists to Contemporary Istanbul for the present, “Spinning the Cocoon.”
Inside, there are collectors, critics, sellers and artists. Behind them, a shocking assemblage of portray, sculpture, images and ranging blended media works are suspended alongside the storied, renovated partitions of the historic conflict room. Instead of the works of artwork, nevertheless, everybody stares. They have stopped of their tracks. No one sips a drink. Cameras don’t flash. There is full silence. What ensues, nightmarish, is the thought of a seer who, alone, espies the soul, the metaphor, the ardour of creation.
Most quick are the cloud-like parchment works of Mithat Şen, whose “Istif” collection entices with summary kinds coloured vibrantly like a naturalist drop in the ocean of modernism. As the bubbles of chilly libations tossed and turned, swashing over tongues that wagged and waved into the eyeless tundra of society, there emerged “Two Angels” (2019), enlightening the bleak ambiance, mobbed by the heady commotion of persona speak. The oil on canvas by Onur Mansız is a scintillating, painterly imaginative and prescient of backyard mysticism.
With a perfectionist contact, the autumn leaves of a forest inside come into lucid focus by the arms of Mansız, whose craft exudes masterful self-discipline. And centered inside the pile of leaves, shot by way of with lichens and evergreens, are a pair of gleaming, porcelain collectible figurines. The use of white paint is nearly hyperreal as the texture of the polished, synthetic objects is juxtaposed with the rustic earthiness of the plant matter surrounding them. The piece has a gravitational pull, a transcendent calling that displays the course of of inventive creativity.
Entrance into trance
Flanking the oils of Mansız are two untitled works by wooden sculptor Burcu Erden, from her 2019 solo present, “Calling for the Mass,” at ArtOn. In distinction to the mild, atmospheric poise of Mansız, Erden’s seize of naturalism is tough, edgy, arduous and uncooked. Anthropomorphic figures rise from stable blocks, headless and animal. They have a extra up to date cousin in a canvas of acrylic and spray paint by Olcay Kuş, “Untitled” (2016), portraying a stencil-like suit-and-tie workaday kind out for a fist-pumping romp.
The curation, a collaborative effort by ArtOn and Contemporary Istanbul, positioned two different works by Kuş throughout from these of Mansız and Erden. From 2018, they’re blended media workouts in the drawing of arms, an in any other case light half of the physique rendered mad with visceral depth by its road artwork aesthetic, and saturated sweet pinks and electrical blues. Clasped like a waiter taking an order, and draped with a semi-abstract serving towel, Kuş’s arms exhibit the energy to present, and to take, beside one other gripping, crumpled paper.
One of the most jolting and large artists in Spinning the Cocoon is Evren Sungur, whose large-scale canvas of charcoal and oil on paper, “The Train of Madness IV” (2018) bears the energy of a civilization and its visible motifs, spanning some imagined epic of muralist-inspired surreality. From the seat of a wood cart, from which a leafless trunk extends upward and branches out with cartoonish and skeletal arms, an entourage of humanoids and beasts are caught in a uncommon second of stillness.
“The Train of Madness IV” has a formidable sweep of depth. Its plurality of perspective attracts notion inward. Theatrical in its scenography, the charcoal drawings are reminiscent of unfinished artworks, in style throughout the Renaissance, and there’s a late medieval, Rabelasian really feel to its potpourri of unseemly characters. About the monochromatic majority, steely, lidless eyes are ever-open, flagged proper angles of jaundiced and flushed hues. And from the arboreal core, white strains mock that of an architectural blueprint, giving definition and idea to the bewilderingly advanced pastiche.
Image after magnificence
Such exhibits as “Spinning the Cocoon” supply unique peeks into the artwork world and its much less seen, rising spheres of affect. The sudden presence of superb artwork prints by artwork photographer Elif Kahveci spiked the occasion punch with a wholesome dose of ambient naivety. Her works are curious reappraisals of the school of sight and its potential to pierce the veil of panorama. Whether of mountains or sea, her lens glides fastidiously over that fluctuating realm of mythopoetic surprise by which the planet overwhelms human life.
Kahveci’s images definitively specific the very which means of the atmosphere as that which surrounds and envelops, however not for mere aesthetic pleasure. Her piece set in the verdant hills of some unique locale footage a single grave immersed in vegetal overgrowth. There is an unmistakable sense of the post-apocalyptic by way of her sight, which she frames in order that viewers can look by way of and expertise, concurrently, her distinctive vantage level. Her second piece is of a seashore, unpopulated but marked with empty chairs. The sky looms enormous above all.
Toward an much more nihilist bent, Olgu Ülkenciler’s 2017 blended media piece, “Fathers and Sons (Turgenyev),” invokes a literary quandary over the dissolution of the self in mild of human nature, and the way organic copy may translate right into a philosophy of worldly disillusionment. With a visible palette comparable in sure respects of shade and type to the graffiti-like strokes of Kuş, and with a daring visionary scope reminiscent of that which Sungur conveys, Ülkenciler’s work ingathers the feeling of filial id and its transmutations of coalescence.
Finally, returning to the city discipline out of which “Spinning the Cocoon” spins are representations of Istanbul, notably in a powerful work by the three-man artist collective, Oddviz, whose photogrammetric digital set up “Kadıköy I” (2018) amalgamates fragments and icons from Istanbul’s trendiest, pro-youth Anatolian neighborhood. A twist of present commentary from the present’s curators, perchance, may be present in one work on show by Ahmet Elhan, “Places – Hagia Sophia 6” (2011), a singular C-print. Elhan, a craftsman of mild and its repetition, has created a symphonic geometry of inside design after the non secular web site.
