'first viewing'

'first viewing'

Burak Ata, Sabo, Burak Dak

The story of art production—of hundreds of years—is a concept that needs to be dealt with both as a source of inspiration and as a way of forming a unique language. The works by Sabo (1988), Burak Ata (1989) and Burak Dak (1988)—all three have just graduated from the Painting Department at Mimar Sinan—carry the deep impact of this process in the works exhibited in their first exhibition. The three are forming their unique languages by addressing, specifically, this process. At this point, the collage technique and the repetition of elements that flow from one work to the other, carrying symbolism, weaves the productions of the three together.

Burak Ata has gone through a period in which he questioned the impact of Renaissance paintings that he encountered during his experience as an exchange student in Italy; he has gone through an intense period of production in which this impression was carried from the level of intuition to that of consciousness. Ata tackles once again Renaissance painters' approach to composition and the relationship between architecture and figure in paintings, focusing on the rested atmosphere of holidays, collaging forms, nature and figuration within specific, classical composition templates using his unique symbolism. He visualizes the strange geometric, architectural and pastoral atmospheres that people under the burning sun, in holiday lethargy, assume, combining different styles in a unique blend at an extraordinary intersection.

Burak Dak's A4-size paintings on paper invite us to an atmosphere that is charged with symbols of paradise and hell descriptions of medieval paintings. At the center of his symbolic language that combines elements from our image world today to pop art to surrealism, is an incredibly meticulous and precise rendition of human bodies that also seem to be haphazardly divided into pieces. The act of breaking the body into pieces seem to contradict the meticulousness of the description of the body, recalling both the relationship that humans have formed with their own bodies as well as the violence directed towards the body and life. Burak Dak places the metaphors of the body that he has formed, inspired by a wide range of figures, including mythological half human half animal beings and popular figures, on the surreal decors, using the main axis of the exhibition—the collage technique. The compositions that emerge enable us to discover different dimensions and elaborations of the story.

Sabo's exchange period in Italy was a much more personal experience, in which he focused on people that he encountered in the flow of daily life. Sabo is inspired by the human states that can be as alienated, as awkward, in nature as they are in the city, focusing his collage technique this time on portraits. Faces, which are the most obviously personal element, become unrecognizable with exploding color and expressionistic interventions, visualizing the energy that they internally carry, but repress in their relationships with the outside world and within webs of communication. The human figures, architecture and natural elements that he masterfully depicts in the realist tradition are carried onto a fantastic plane, centrally occupied by explosions of color and paint, while nature is abstracted, the expression is shifted from facial features to the abstraction of expressionistic stains.

These three young artists determinedly deal with the phenomena that trigger, seduce and impact them in the processes of perception, intuition, fiction and de-construction, summed up in this attempt to produce a unique language from here. In their first exhibition at artSümer, the three close friends invite the viewers to a unique experience within this whole of symbols, stories, and moments that they lay bare in this first exhibition, inviting us to be a part of this dialogue, carrying their silent conversations into the exhibition space.