Artist Statement

I have been working on the notion of opposition both in my paintings and engravings.

When we have a look at my different series from the past to the present, this opposition is sometimes achieved through obvious contrasts of the different values of the colors, sometimes with light-dark areas, sometimes by distinct texture contrasts or opposing concepts: Existence and nonexistence, birth and death, organic and inorganic, fresh and faded… Leaves, feathers, eggs, bitten apples and rotting fruits always carry marks that point to the beginning and the end. Thus, it establishes links with “vanitas” and “memento mori” in art history.

In my opinion, everything integrates and exists with an opposite notion. I have always observed that in my life. The best way to reveal an object or phenomenon pictorially is to show and use its oppositions like color, meaning or other elements. Thus, a harmony is reached, just like the harmony of contrasting colors. In my “Chiaroscuro” series, I aimed to pay attention to lonely figures in public spaces by grading the light-shadow in different saturation and value inside and outside the elliptical shape.

In my watercolors, pastels and “Eternal Return” series I handle two poles that alternate in a continuous cycle of greening-drying, budding again and wilting. In this case, I question whether existence and extinction and all similar oppositions are really opposite concepts or are they just parts of a successive, repetitive process.

While questioning and researching this cycle, I was impressed by Nietzsche’s philosophy of “Eternal Return”. “Eternal return” means the destruction and rebirth. According to Nietzsche, life contains the contradictions. “Pain is also a joy, a curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun. A wise man is also a fool…All things are enchained, entwined.”^[1]

In my daily life, in my nature walks, I always search for effects, objects and organisms that remind me of this opposition and cycle and I transfer some of them to my works. This cycle and “eternal return” are treated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as follows: “Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally.”[2]

[1] W. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Translated by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge University Press 2006, s.: 263.

[2] W. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Translated by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge University Press 2006, s.: 175.